The Friar and the Cipher

by Lawrence Goldstone

  A skryer was a spiritual medium, someone who, under the right circumstances, could establish a link between the terrestrial world and that of God and heaven. (There were some skryers who could summon up demons, of course, but Dee, a devoutly religious man, would have nothing to do with them.) In the course of his many foreign travels, Dee had purchased a crystal ball, which he called a magic mirror or “shew-stone.” It was one of his most prized possessions; he had showed it off to Elizabeth once when she came to visit. But, try as he might, when Dee peered into his rock he saw nothing. Consequently, he was on the lookout for someone to act as intermediary between himself and the angelic spirits. “[I] confessed myself a long time to have been desirous to have help in my philosophical studies through the company and information of the blessed angels of God,” Dee wrote. When he mentioned the problem to Kelley, the younger man offered to give it a try. “[Kelley was] willing and desirous to see or show something in spiritual practice.”

  Edward Kelley, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY

  Kelley was even better at skrying than Dee could have hoped. Kelley saw all kinds of angels in the glass. He saw the angel Uriel, whom God had used to warn Noah of the impending flood. Uriel was a spirit Dee was particularly interested in meeting. He wasn't even an ordinary angel—he was an archangel. After Uriel, Kelley saw Michael, an even more prestigious archangel than Uriel, another on Dee's most wanted list. In fact, through Kelley, Dee got a chance to meet all the really important angels, the ones who could help him in his research.

  But Kelley didn't just see the angels. He talked for them, or they talked through him. They used different voices and different forms. Sometimes they were male and threatening. Sometimes they were flirtatious women. Sometimes they were innocent little girls. Dee would ask them questions and Kelley would answer, roaming around the room, talking in curious, archaic languages, offering advice and revealing secrets, taking on various personalities.

  So convinced was Dee that he was indeed in communication with the spirit world that he went to great lengths to ensure that his sessions with Kelley and the angels were productive. He had a whole procedure for it: for three days before, neither man could engage in “Coitus & Gluttony . . . [each must] wash hands, face, cut nails, shave the beard, wash all . . . [prayers should be said] 5 times to the East, as many to the West, so many to the South & to the North.” He wrote down every word of these sessions, and they are preserved in his diaries. “It is hard to find in print a more amazing farrago of nonsense,” the historian Henry Carrington Bolton noted in his book The Follies of Science at the Court of Rudolph II.

  By the time of Lord Albert Laski's visit, Kelley was a valued member of Dee's household. But the séances at Mortlake had attracted others' attention as well. Word had got out to the countryside, and Dee was rumored to be a wizard and had become the subject of petty harassments. More important, knowledge of Dee and Kelley's activities had come to Walsingham's attention. A resourceful young scoundrel like Kelley was even more useful to an intelligence network than a credulous old man like Dee. Walsingham blackmailed Kelley into becoming a spy. So it was that when Lord Albert Laski went back to Crakow, he took Dee and Kelley and their wives and children with him.

  It is difficult to evaluate their performance as secret agents. Inconspicuous they weren't.

  They settled on Laski's estates and proceeded to spend his lordship's money on alchemical experiments at an alarming rate. Laski soon tired of them and sent them off to Prague to the court of Rudolph II with letters of introduction. Rudolph, whose childhood had been spent at the fanatically Catholic court of his uncle, Philip II of Spain, and who had been unbalanced by the experience, was known to have an interest in art and the occult. Alchemy and the search for the philosopher's stone dominated his life. He kept a fully equipped laboratory manned with alchemists and had once singed his beard while trying to turn lead into gold.

  Rudolph II of Bohemia

  Rudolph had a magnificently idiosyncratic collection of paintings, part masterpiece, part junk, which were hung helter-skelter on the walls of the palace, as well as a library of mystical manuscripts. He kept a menagerie of wild animals, which included a lion cub named Otakar. He maintained huge gardens filled with exotic plants, including flowers brought back from the New World. Rudolph grew the first tulip in Bohemia—he named it Maria, after his mother—and employed many botanists. Although he never married, he fathered many children, and a parade of women went in and out of the castle.

  Rudolph, with the treasury of the empire behind him, was known to pay generously for his pleasures. Accordingly, in addition to legitimate scientists and artists—Rudolph supported the astronomer Tycho Brahe and bought paintings by Titian and Holbein—the emperor also attracted a hodgepodge of con men, forgers, and unscrupulous dealers in “curiosities.”

  Kelley, especially, was in his element. While Dee obtained an audience with the emperor and lectured him on science and mathematics, introducing him to the work of Roger Bacon, Kelley turned lead into gold with the aid of a crucible equipped with a false wax bottom laced with gold filings. Emboldened by success, Kelley staged an even larger demonstration. He invited all of Rudolph's alchemists to witness one of his experiments and had a big box full of instruments and chemicals wheeled into the laboratory. He threw some iron and some red dust, “the philosopher's stone,” into the fire and then made everyone leave for an hour while he murmured mystical incantations. When the other scientists had cleared the room, Kelley's brother got out of the false bottom of the box and threw real gold nuggets into the fire.

  Kelley's fame thus expanded at the expense of Dee's, and the old man became even more dependent on his protégé. Kelley used his power mercilessly. He would refuse to look into the crystal for Dee, which drove the aging philosopher to despair. Dee tried to get his ten-year-old son, Arthur, to skry for him, but no matter how long the boy sat and stared he never saw anything. When Kelley did condescend to hold a séance, the angels made strange requests. The climax to this absurd drama came when the angels demanded that Dee and Kelley share wives. (Jane, Dee's third wife, was much younger than he was and attractive. By contrast, Mrs. Kelley had long since ceased to interest Mr. Kelley.) Although he demurred at first—there was not much precedent for wife swapping in the Bible—the angels eventually convinced Dee that the command came from God, and he acquiesced.

  Through it all, Dee remained in correspondence with Walsingham, and he and Kelley did manage to make contact with the Italian double agent Francesco Pucci. Pucci, a lapsed Catholic, was later accused of having bribed one of the pope's servants to copy letters written by Philip of Spain discussing the sabotage of a certain English forest that supplied timber for the queen's navy. The Spanish were planning to send a small band of men to burn down the forest so that the English would not be able to build new ships. Forewarned by Dee, Walsingham's men were able to intercept this troop before they did any damage.

  But Dee also made enemies—Pucci was one of them—and was regarded with suspicion by members of Rudolph's court. It was whispered that he and Kelley were English spies. Kelley, ever the survivor, began to make side deals. The result was that Dee had to flee for his life while Kelley was embraced by the emperor and elevated to knighthood. Before he left, Dee had to surrender most of his valuables to Kelley, ostensibly to be used to bribe Lord Rosenberg, a powerful lord of the realm, for safe conduct. “Feb. 4th [1589], I delivered to Mr. Kelley the powder, the bokes, the glas and the bone, for the Lord Rosenberg; and he thereuppon gave me dischardg in writing of his own hand subscribed and sealed,” Dee wrote in his diary.

  Dee came back from England to discover that his library had been vandalized in his absence. He lost five hundred volumes, and, although it was claimed that an unruly mob broke in, most of the books ended up in the libraries of other scholars. After his Bohemian adventure, Dee never regained his former influence at court, and his reputation as a scientist and mathematician went into decline. Walsi
ngham died in 1590, still in the queen's service, having secured her safety by subverting the Spanish plans for the Armada and buying England enough time to prepare for the assault. According to Simon Singh, “After his death, it was discovered that he had been receiving regular reports from twelve locations in France, nine in Germany, four in Spain, four in Italy, and three in the Low Countries, as well as having informants in Constantinople, Algiers and Tripoli.”

  His employer and protector dead, Dee lived the rest of his life in poverty, even resorting to selling his precious books to live; in the end he was exiled to a nondescript position in Manchester and died in relative obscurity around 1609.

  As for Edward Kelley, for three years he was Rudolph's favorite, dubbed the “Golden Knight” for his alchemical triumphs, rewarded with estates and riches. He lived the life of a lord, moved in aristocratic circles, dressed in silks. Then, in 1592, he had an altercation with one of the emperor's retainers, killed his opponent in a duel, and was thrown into a dungeon for the crime. Rudolph thought to use this opportunity to pry out his alchemical secrets and had Kelley tortured, but since the secrets had more to do with subterfuge than science Kelley could not answer his interrogator's questions. In desperation, he tried a daring escape over the castle wall with a rope, fell and sustained internal injuries, and died soon after.

  THERE WAS ONE MORE ELEMENT to this story. While in Prague, around the year 1586, Dee's son Arthur remembered his father having a strange book, which he later sold for six hundred gold ducats to the Italian spy Pucci. This book, Arthur later told his friend Thomas Browne, was “a booke . . . containing nothing butt Hieroglyphicks, which booke his father bestowed much time upon: but I could not heare that hee could make it out.”

  It is just about this time that the emperor Rudolph purchased a manuscript for the hefty sum of six hundred gold ducats. He believed this to be an original work by Roger Bacon, a man in whose magical and scientific achievements he had become extremely interested as a result of his sessions with John Dee. The odd thing about the manuscript was that it was written entirely in cipher.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Brilliant Braggart:

  Francis Bacon

  • • •

  IT IS EASY, particularly in the light of the later scandals in Bohemia, to dismiss John Dee's contribution to the advancement of modern science. But the follies of his twilight years and his increasing devotion to spiritualism mask his true legacy. In the fifty years dating from Dee's first commanding lectures on Euclid in Paris, the pace of scientific thought in England, moribund for so many centuries, had quickened perceptibly, so that what had appeared daring and innovative at mid-century was already outdated by 1600. That this was so, that scientific thought was capable of shaking off the shackles of superstition so decisively as to render John Dee's notions ridiculous in his lifetime, was due in no small part to Dee himself—or, rather, to Dee's library at Mortlake.

  The library at Mortlake was an engine that helped fuel the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, of which Britain was an undeniable leader. The presence of so many books, so easily accessible from London and therefore available to so many of England's best minds, jump-started the process of intellectual development in that country in the same way that the sudden influx of translated Greek manuscripts from Toledo had precipitated the scientific renaissance of the thirteenth century. Dee's library succored geographers and mathematicians, philosophers, explorers, and poets. There, at Mortlake, was the embryo for what would eventually grow into the colossus known as the Royal Society.

  And since no one could enter that library and not feel the power of Roger Bacon's work, Bacon's thoughts entered the mainstream of English consciousness in a way that would not have been possible otherwise. John Dee had personally promoted the mystique of Roger Bacon, but his library advanced the thirteenth-century friar's ideas. These ideas were absorbed by many scholars, but one in particular stands out as Bacon's true intellectual descendant, the man who finally brought Roger Bacon's notion of experimental science into the sunlight, so much so that because they hold the same surname, the two are often confused: Francis Bacon.

  John Dee performing an alchemical feat for Rudolph II in a nineteenth-century painting EDGAR FAHS SMITH COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA LIBRARY

  FEW IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY OR SCIENCE have a larger presence than Francis Bacon, but the question is, as what? Genius, humbug, solitary scholar, stentorious self-promoter, loyal friend, ambitious betrayer, judge, thief, social climber, member of Parliament, mystic, experimentalist, original thinker, shameless plagiarist, and sometime reputed author of Shakespeare's plays—Francis Bacon was all of these and more. His proponents have pronounced him the father of modern science; detractors asserted that “few attempts at giving a new direction to the pursuit of truth have been more overrated.” Will Durant described him as “the greatest and proudest intellect of [his] age”; the social anthropologist Loren Eiseley called him “the man who saw through time”; and the scientific historian Lynn Thorndike said that “he was a crooked chancellor in a moral sense and a crooked naturalist in an intellectual and scientific sense.”

  Francis Bacon was born in 1561, three years after Elizabeth ascended the throne. Like Roger Bacon, he was a younger son; his father, Nicholas, was the keeper of the royal seal, a position of great prestige. The most important member of the family was his uncle by marriage, the even more prestigious (and extremely wealthy) William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Elizabeth's royal treasurer and first secretary of state.

  When he was twelve, Francis was shipped off to Cambridge for much the same reasons as had been Roger Bacon to Oxford 350 years before. When his father died six years later, Francis, by then in the queen's service, saw that his road for both position and money went through Cecil. But Cecil did not think much of his egocentric and crassly ambitious nephew. In one of his many entreaties to his uncle to provide a path to position and wealth that went unanswered, Bacon is famous for having said, “The objection of my years will wear away the length of my suit.”

  The life of a gentleman seemingly beyond reach, Bacon turned to practical pursuits. He earned a law degree in 1582, showing such aptitude for the profession that he was soon lecturing, and then at age twenty-three got himself elected to Parliament, where he would remain a member for almost forty years. From here, Bacon spent much of the next decade currying favor with the powerful while serving in a series of minor roles in English government. In his free time, he began serious study of history, philosophy, and science. “I have taken all knowledge to be my province,” he wrote to Cecil, with the utter lack of humility that had already become his trademark, doing little to dispel his uncle's opinion of him.

  Like every other scholar of the period, Bacon spent little time at the largely denuded university libraries. Rather, he sought out the best-stocked of the private libraries, and the largest and most extensive personal collection in England was at Mortlake.

  Nicholas Bacon had been a friend of Dee's, and there is an entry in Dee's diary for August 11, 1582, indicating that twenty-one-year-old Francis had visited him and made use of his books. (Also present at that meeting was Walsingham's cryptographer, Thomas Philips.) There is no specific documentation of further visits, but it has long been suspected that Dee provided the young, prodigious Francis Bacon a detailed introduction to the work of his thirteenth-century namesake, even mentored him in experimentalism. Bacon's subsequent output in the sciences would more than bear that out. It was shortly after the Mortlake visit—or visits—that Bacon began work on a vast scientific project on which he would labor for the rest of his life. It was also about this time that he developed a lifelong interest in ciphers.*5

  It would be more than two decades, however, before Bacon would write publicly on science. During Elizabeth's reign, he wrote mostly on politics and ethics, showing such foresight that a seventeenth-century observer noted that, had his ideas been adopted, “all the troubles of the next forty years might
have been avoided.” Foresight did not make Bacon popular at court, however. Convinced that unity would serve England more than discord, he issued a paper in favor of religious tolerance that piqued both the queen and Cecil. Both made it clear to Bacon that if he wished to advance himself—a desire of which he made little secret—he was going to have to keep his mouth shut and play along. Bacon, however, was unwilling to suppress opinions that he was convinced were the most enlightened in England (and probably anywhere else). In 1593, to demonstrate his unwillingness to kowtow to the aging Cecil or the intractable Elizabeth, he publicly declared himself opposed to the queen's plan to raise taxes.

  Elizabeth was furious, and Bacon was shunned at court. The direct road to power now cut off, Bacon was forced to cast about for a new sponsor. He found one in Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, a man of his own generation and disposition, and there is nothing that epitomizes the extremes of Bacon's public life and reputation more than the course of their friendship.

  Essex, five years Bacon's junior, was handsome, brave, intelligent, headstrong, passionate, and a favorite of the queen's, even rumored to have been her lover. (Errol Flynn played him in the movies, too, in Elizabeth and Essex.) He became both Bacon's friend and patron, while in turn Bacon provided counsel as to how Essex might increase his power in the government (and by association, Bacon's own), something the ambitious earl was chafing to do. In the early 1590s, the grateful Essex pushed for Bacon to be named attorney general, a plan foiled by Cecil himself, who instead prevailed upon Elizabeth to appoint the more agreeable Edward Coke. Essex consoled Bacon by granting him an estate at Twickenham and a stipend of £1,800 to keep it up.