Against the Flow

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by Tom Fort


  It is a relief to retreat downstairs from these scenes of carnage to the peaceful fishing section of the museum. The lives and works of Jakub Krčín, Josef Štěpánek Netolický and other architects of the Bohemian carp culture are recorded in panels, old prints, scraps of letters and other documents. Proper acknowledgement is made of the seminal contribution of the great Bishop Jan Dubravius of Olomouc, whose book De Piscinis et Piscibus – translated into English as A New Booke of Good Husbandry Concerning the Order and Manner of Making Fish-ponds, with the Breeding, Preserving and Multiplying of the Carpe, Tench, Pike and Troute – served as the standard textbook for generations of fish-farmers in every part of Europe. Ancient maps show the amazing scale of pond construction (by 1550 there were 26,000 of them in Bohemia, in case you’re interested). There is a bronze sculpture of a carp, not as extravagant as the one on the roundabout at Třeboň, but equally full of scaly charm.

  Bohemian carp

  One old photograph records a visit by notabilities to the Třeboň fishing pavilion, decked out for the occasion with oars and spears and other paraphernalia, and festooned with nets as if it had been trapped in a gigantic spider’s web. Another shows a line of 40 or 50 men up to their knees in the water hauling in the catch, while behind them stand wagons filled with barrels ready to take the harvest away.

  The carp is the pre-eminent species featured in the museum, but others do get a look in. In one of the rooms there is even a display cabinet dedicated to the European eel, with a map showing its breeding grounds in the Sargasso Sea, as well as an assortment of eel spears and traps and a somewhat wizened specimen of the fish itself. It would have been nice if they had included a Czech translation of my own The Book of Eels but one cannot have everything, even in the best of museums.

  In the autumn of 1586 two Englishmen arrived in Třeboň with their families, and were made welcome on the orders of Vilém of Rožmberk. They were given comfortable quarters in the castle and a laboratory was established for them in one of the gatehouses, fitted out with all manner of curious equipment. For the best part of three years the activities of the pair gave the people of the town something other than carp to talk about.

  Vilém’s all-powerful regent, Jakub Krčín, did not take kindly to their presence, denouncing them to his master – with good reason, in the case of one – as spongers, charlatans and scoundrels. But Vilém had more pressing matters on his mind than the outbursts of his temperamental factotum or even the fall-out from his pond-building programme. His difficulty could be summed up thus: three wives, no son. His heir was his younger brother, unmarried and therefore of no dynastic use at all. Vilém was acutely aware that time in which to extend the Rožmberk line was running out. He had his eye on a final throw of the marital dice with Polyxena Perňstejn, daughter of his pond rival to the north, but could not afford another barren match. He needed assurances that the auspices were favourable and help in securing a fruitful outcome, and he believed that the Englishmen might hold the key.

  They made an oddly assorted partnership. The senior, by about 30 years, was Doctor John Dee, Elizabeth I’s ‘noble intelligencer’, mathematician, astronomer, geographer, bibliophile, astrologer, philosopher, occultist; at that time just past the zenith of his fame as Europe’s leading seeker after obscure truths and explorer of dark mysteries. The reputation of his companion, Edward Kelley, was less exalted. His long curly hair was rumoured to conceal at least one cropped ear, punishment – so it was said – either for forgery or for the more serious offence of entering a graveyard at Walton-le-Dale in Lancashire in order to exhume a corpse and persuade it to ‘deliver strange Predictions’ of the ‘manner and time of death of a Noble young Gentleman as then in Wardship’.

  Dee, for all his oddities and failings, was a man of powerful intellect and high principle, whereas Kelley was a conman and cozener. Yet Kelley – like the diabolical Scorpio Murtlock in Anthony Powell’s Hearing Secret Harmonies – evidently possessed unusual magnetism and other very special gifts. The most precious of these, in the eyes of Doctor Dee and Vilém of Rožmberk, was the easy access he enjoyed to the ‘other’ world beyond the physical sphere.

  It is not easy for twenty-first-century rationalists to understand the deep seriousness with which the invisible spirit forces of the universe were viewed in the pre-scientific age. This was not just the province of cranks and black magicians, although there were plenty of them about. Most educated people believed without question in the existence of the spirits; and, further, that if a discourse with them could be established and maintained, their great powers might be deployed in an earthly setting. To Dee – as to Paracelsus, Tycho Brahe and other great minds of the time – the spirit sphere was as real as the earth beneath their feet. The problem for Dee was gaining access to it. He did not have the skrying skill. Edward Kelley did.

  Soon after their first meeting, at Dee’s house beside the Thames at Mortlake, Kelley was facilitating extended exchanges with the angels. These were very numerous – 49 of them had names beginning with B, including Blumaza, Blintom and Bmanigal – but one in particular was most keen to talk. She was a little girl in a gown of ‘changeable green and red’, who skipped in and out between Dee’s piles of books and left no reflection when she passed in front of the mirror. She said her name was Madimi. Through Kelley, the Doctor asked her where her home was. She replied that if she told him, she would be beaten. ‘You shall not be beaten for telling the truth to them that love the truth,’ he replied.

  The road from Mortlake to Třeboň was long and circuitous. It took Dee and Kelley and their wives and Dee’s children first to Poland with the dangerous and shady Count Olbracht Łaski, who hoped to invoke spirit help to put him on the Polish throne; and from Poland, inevitably, to Prague, where Europe’s leading patron of the dark arts, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, held sway. This erudite, melancholic monarch was – in the opinion of the historian R. J. W. Evans – in the grip of an obsession with the occult that bordered on madness. He had gathered around him a scrum of alchemists, quacks, crooks, soothsayers, Rosicrucian frauds, black magicians, white magicians and the odd genuine man of learning, all offering – at a price – to reveal to him the secrets of the other side.

  For a time Dee and Kelley prospered. Kelley had a remarkable flair for self-promotion, and Prague was soon buzzing with the story of how Arthur Dee, the Doctor’s eight-year-old son, had been seen playing with gold quoits ‘made by projection’ in the garret of their lodgings. But in Rudolf’s city few stars apart from his own burned brightly for long. Spiteful and envious murmurings against the Englishmen reached the Emperor’s ears, and he abruptly banished them. At the same time, though, he acceded to the pleas of his friend Vilém of Rožmberk, who continued to hope that Dee and Kelley could help him in his quest for an heir, and graciously gave permission for them to go to Třeboň.

  Edward Kelley could recognise a golden goose when he saw one. Soon after the channel of communication between Třeboň Castle and the angelic host was established, Vilém received assurances – couched in the usual ambiguous terms – that his plan was viewed favourably on high. In January his marriage to Polyxena Perňstejn was celebrated with a four-day feast in the course of which twelve tons of venison, nine tons of sucking pig, two tons of cheese, 20,000 eggs, 1,290 hares and 5,800 carp were consumed.

  But Kelley’s prime interest soon shifted from skrying to the potentially more lucrative field of alchemy. The lights burned late in the laboratory as he worked on a formula said to have been revealed to him in a document recovered from the crypt at Glastonbury, which involved dissolving silver in Aqua Regia, precipitating it with salt, mixing it with potash and lime, refining the blend, and adding solutions of mercury, depositing black earth, circulating pelican, settling the Red Oil and tincturing it with quicksilver. Another procedure required the rubbing of vinegar rust with sal ammoniac, thickening the resulting oil into stone, adding smears of menstrual fluid and fragments of horse manure, and mixing the pulverised com
pound with melted silver.

  To keep his patron sweet, Kelley was still prepared to consult the angels on such matters as propitious times for Vilém to attempt to impregnate his new wife. But he became increasingly impatient with Dee’s endless requests for audiences, which he saw as a tedious and unprofitable waste of time better spent among the tinctures and elixirs. The old man had become a nuisance. Kelley resolved to get rid of him if he could.

  One evening during Lent in 1587, Kelley unexpectedly acceded to a request from Dee for him to sit before the seeing stone. He relayed a written message: ‘He who commits adultery because of me, let him be blessed for charity and receive the heavenly prize.‘ The following day, according to Kelley, the child-like Madimi appeared and opened her cloak to reveal herself naked. Later she went into an orchard and grafted together the branches of a tree. Pressed for an explanation by a dumbfounded Dee, Kelley said the vision amounted to an instruction that he and the Doctor should have sex with each other’s wives. Dee was appalled. He clearly suspected that his colleague was up to lustful tricks, but he was also desperate not to lose his route to revelation. In the end he ordered his beloved wife Jane to comply. One night in May the two couples withdrew together to a chamber in the castle. Dee noted in his diary pactum factum – pact fulfilled.

  Two days later Kelley reported seeing in the globe a Golden Woman who told him that she was ‘a harlot for such as ravish me and a virgin with such as know me not’, and promising to ‘stand naked before you that your love may be more inflamed towards me’. That was the final spiritual action that Dee saw fit to record in his diary; quite possibly the final one Kelley performed for him. Forty weeks after the consummation of the ‘cross-matching’, Jane Dee gave birth to a son christened Theodorus Trebonius. A few months later an old friend of Dee’s, Sir Edward Dyer, arrived in Třeboň. Dee’s initial pleasure quickly gave way to resentment as it became apparent that Dyer’s chief purpose was to try to persuade Kelley to return to England to place his talents at the service of Queen Elizabeth.

  In the spring of 1589 the Doctor and his family left Třeboň for home. He never saw his skryer again.

  For a time Kelley’s reputation as Europe’s leading practical alchemist soared. In London Edward Dyer told a dinner party that included the Archbishop of Canterbury how he had seen ‘Mr Kelley put of the base metal into the crucible and after it was set a little upon the fire and a very small quantity of medicine put in and stirred with a stick of wood, it came forth in great proportion perfect gold.’ Another report, from Prague, described Kelley making gold rings on demand. He was said to have sent a bedpan as a present to Queen Elizabeth, part of which he had transmuted into gold.

  The Queen’s chief minister, William Cecil, sent a stream of messengers and messages to Bohemia, commanding and then imploring Kelley to return and help England in her time of need. In vain. ‘I am not so mad as to run away from my present honour and lands,’ he replied. By now he had been created Baron Kelley by a grateful Vilém, who lavished on him estates, nine villages, two mansions in Prague and a castle. Rudolf himself was sufficiently impressed to summon the Baron to Prague to perform his wonders, then had him locked up when he failed to produce the goods. He talked his way out of jail, but after the death of Vilém of Rožmberk (still heirless), was imprisoned again, this time in the formidable fortress standing on a crag overlooking Brüx (as Most was then known).

  Fittingly, his eventual fate remains obscure. Doctor Dee recorded in his diary in November 1595: ‘Sir E. Kelley slain.’ It was reported that, in attempting to escape from his cell window down a rope of knotted sheets, he had fallen and died of his injuries. But some maintained that he had faked his death and escaped. Some years later there was a story that he had been spotted in Moscow, in disguise, still practising alchemy.

  With Sir Edward Kelley, Knight of Bohemia and self-styled scion of ‘the knightly kin and house of Conaghaku in the Kingdom of Ireland’, there were always more questions than answers. One of those questions – not yet addressed by historians, as far as I am aware – is whether he ever took time off from his laboratory in Třeboň to go carp fishing.

  I like to think he did. Certainly the fishing was there, on his doorstep. And there is evidence that Kelley was, indeed, a Brother of the Angle, who took delight in what Walton called ‘the contemplative man’s recreation’. On one occasion, back in Mortlake, Doctor Dee received a party of dignitaries including Count Łaski, who was anxious for news from the other side as to how his bid to become King of Poland might be viewed. Kelley was urgently needed to open the dialogue but was not to be found, and at length the disgruntled party left by boat. When Kelley finally appeared, the Doctor demanded to know where he had been. ‘Fishing’ was the answer.

  I picture the Baron, with his hat pulled down over his mutilated ears, wandering off into the meadows around Třeboň, a long pole of ash in hand, a horsehair line in his pocket, a ball of honey paste in a bag. I see him beside the green water, thinking of carp and gold. I see him catching one and holding it, admiring the glittering scales, like so many sovereigns.

  When I visited Třeboň I discovered to my disappointment that I had missed the daily fish market. To make up for this I joined one of the tours of the strikingly sgraffito-ed château built by the last of the Lords of the Rose, Petr Vok. I had a vague hope that it might include a look at Doctor Dee and Edward Kelley’s notorious laboratory, or at least their quarters. But it didn’t; in fact, it was a severe letdown all round. We shuffled through a succession of gloomy, vaulted chambers while our female guide kept up a relentless commentary about the suits of armour, stacks of halberds and pikes, heavy furniture and mediocre portraits arranged in them. The only exhibits of interest to me were a pair of fantastic late-seventeenth-century maps showing the Třeboň fishpond complex, with houses, churches, woods, fields, embankments and channels individually depicted. As far as I could tell – the guide spoke in Czech only – she said nothing about the ponds, or about the savage Jakub Krčín, or the sinister activities of the English spirit-seekers.

  Afterwards I strolled out of the back of the château and up the embankment forming the northern side of Krčín’s first major excavation. Its construction required the submerging of one of Třeboň’s suburbs, which caused so much trouble with the locals that he initially called it Nevděk, meaning Ingratitude. Later Krčín reported proudly to Vilém of Rožmberk that the latest harvest had included 1,224 barrels of carp as well as multitudes of pike – ‘such fat carp and bigger pike have we not found in any other pond … therefore it would be suitable if your Grace would be pleased for some other ponds still to be added’.

  A statue of Krčín stands among the trees near the water’s edge. Rough maps of his two epic excavations are carved into the base. Above, the figure of the master pond-builder – bare-headed, bearded, in ruff, doublet, hose, breeches and buckled shoes – stares sternly out over the water. Behind him is the town that he made the Carp Capital of Bohemia.

  Chapter 16

  Town and country in Transylvania

  THE ROAD FROM the south-west into the Romanian town of Târgu Mureş is long, straight and uninviting. From far away the prospect is dominated by a smoking, steaming throwback to the Stalinist vision of the factory age: a sprawling confusion of writhing pipework, storage tanks, pylons, chutes, cooling towers, railway tracks and wagons, filthy blocks of brick and concrete, mounds of coal and spoil, from the heart of which pokes a very tall, slender chimney exhaling a crescent-shaped plume of smoke into the sky.

  The plant produces fertiliser, and the name of the company – Azomureş – is written in gaunt letters over the main entrance, through which aged trucks coated in grime heave themselves, wheezing under their loads. Beyond the gates to the fertiliser plant loom the first clumps of apartment blocks, inescapable monuments to socialist planning across eastern Europe, which in Romania seemed to achieve a pitch of dinginess and shoddiness unmatched by its neighbours. Looking from the outside at these grey, jerry
-built cuboids, it is not easy to picture people making comfortable, even beautiful, homes of their little boxes, or being creative and happy inside them; a failure of the imagination, of course, as many did and were.

  Further on, the road reaches the central square of Târgu Mureş, where, aesthetically, matters improve considerably. The square is in fact a long rectangle just wide enough to accommodate a municipal garden of regimented rose beds, paths, benches and trees. Two large and striking public buildings of the pre-1914 vernacular Art Nouveau movement – the City Hall and the Palace of Culture – stand almost side by side at the south-west end. Their mosaics, stained glass windows, spiky towers and turrets, gleaming tiles and soaring majolica-tiled roofs, give them an exotic, almost outlandish flavour. Looming at the other end of the square is the grey, domed bulk of the Orthodox cathedral, deposited there in the 1930s. To one side of it stands the baroque Catholic church of St John the Baptist, a light and airy reminder of the times of Maria Theresa and her repudiated faith.

  The flanks of the rectangle and the streets leading away from it are mostly lined with the kind of buildings that give such a pleasant feel to so many Habsburg towns. Their stuccoed fronts, ornamented windows and doors, and pastel colours – daffodil, mustard, peach, sky-blue, strawberry, apricot, cream – combine to give an effect of cheerful good humour. It takes little effort of the imagination to travel back in time and picture their booted, behatted, bewhiskered owners pausing to look back at them, thumbs tucked into waistcoat pockets, watch-chains glinting, with expressions of quiet satisfaction at the state of home, family, the world; then turning away to do some business at the bank, followed perhaps by a game of billiards at the club and half an hour with the newspaper in the smoking room, catching up on the society gossip and news from the Diet in Budapest.

 

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