Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows!4
Nostradamus had foretold such discord and Dee’s selection of the coronation day had to prevent it.
Dee was well qualified for the role. His Propaedeumata had established him as one of the country’s leading natural philosophers and revived interest in mathematically-based astrology (as opposed to the divination practised by Nostradamus). His frantic bibliographic activity during Mary’s reign had also armed him with a formidable array of ancient texts from which to cite precedents and authorities.
But this was not enough to erase the stigma of his association with Bonner, which, thanks to Foxe and others was already widely suspected, if not known. There must have been some other redeeming quality.
A clue lies in the treatment Dee received in Foxe’s account of Bonner’s persecutions. In the first edition of Acts and Monuments, which was being completed in Basle around this time, Dee’s involvement with Bonner is fully documented. However, by the 1576 edition, he has completely disappeared. His words are still there but every occurrence of his name (more than ten) has been deleted, or substituted with the anonymous ‘a Doctor’.
This erasure is almost unique in a work otherwise notable for naming names. For example, in one of Philpot’s interrogations, Dee is joined by another Doctor, one Chedsey, whom Foxe did not allow the same anonymity, not even when they appeared in the same sentence.5 Perhaps Foxe removed Dee’s name because he was threatened with legal action, or pressurised by the court. But this seems unlikely. Acts and Monuments rapidly became one of the most revered texts of the Elizabethan age; the Queen commanded a copy to be lodged in every cathedral library in the country. Far more probable is that Foxe learned more about Dee’s activities in Bonner’s household and this meant that the portrayal of him in Acts and Monuments as a Catholic colluder was unfair.
In a deposition made to a delegation of Queen’s commissioners in 1582, Dee states that his arrest and handover to Bonner resulted from him being engaged upon ‘some travails for her Majesty’s behalf.’ He had undertaken these unspecified travails ‘to the comfort of her Majesty’s favourers then, and some of her principal servants, at Woodstock’, Woodstock being the palace where Elizabeth was held under arrest. These ‘favourers’ undoubtedly included Robert Dudley. They also included John Ashley, who had since become Master of the Queen’s Jewel House. Dudley was dead by the time Dee came to be interviewed, but Ashley was still alive, and Dee invited the Queen’s commissioners to go and ask him about the Bonner years should they disbelieve his claims.
Of course, these ‘travails’ may have been an invention. But, as Dee well knew, his testimonial to the commissioners would be read by Elizabeth, who was obviously in a position to confirm whether or not, at least in this respect, it was true.
It seems reasonable to assume that Dee’s presence in Bonner’s household was known, perhaps even encouraged by Elizabeth and her supporters. This would explain why, having been deprived of the rectorship of Upton after his arrest in 1553, he was now awarded the living at Leadenham in Lincolnshire, which was presented to him by two members of the Stanley family, Sir William and Henry, Lord Strange.6
Thus it was not as a shamed member of a failed regime that Dee emerged into the limelight in late 1558, but as the loyal ally of a glorious new one, as an ‘intelligencer’, in all the possible meanings of that peculiar Elizabethan term: a seeker of hidden knowledge, philosophical and scientific, as well as a spy.
The Christmas festivities of 1558-9 provided Catholic onlookers with disturbing portents of Elizabeth’s religious policies. ‘Your lordship will have heard of the farce performed in the presence of Her Majesty on Epiphany Day,’ wrote a concerned Spanish ambassador to his Duke, referring to a Twelfth Night masque. He had been appalled by the ‘mummery performed after supper, of crows in the habits of cardinals, of asses habited as bishops, and of wolves representing abbots’. ‘I will consign it to silence,’ he added.7
In the midst of these revelries, Dee set about writing a long and detailed analysis of the astrological augurs for her reign. He chose 15 January 1559 as its start date. His reasons, along with the document setting them out, are lost, but no doubt he was swayed by Jupiter being in Aquarius, suggesting the emergence of such statesmanlike qualities as impartiality, independence and tolerance, and Mars in Scorpio providing the passion and commitment a ruler needed.8 Such a day would mark the nativity of a great reign.
Having set the date, Dee was invited by Robert Dudley for an audience with the Queen at Whitehall Palace.
At the appointed time, Dee passed through the three-storey entrance gate of chequered flint and stone and approached the Great Hall built by Cardinal Wolsey. He was presented to Elizabeth by Dudley and the Earl of Pembroke. Dee remembered vividly what she said to him: ‘Where my brother hath given him a crown, I will give him a noble.’ It was a clever play on the names of coins, the noble being a gold piece worth two silver crowns. But this was not an offer of small change. She was promising a doubling of the fortunes he had enjoyed under Edward. He was to become a favoured member of her court, a player in the great Protestant era to come.
Dee might even have imagined she meant more. Was there not a suggestion, a hint – Dee’s mathematical mind could have calculated the implications in an instant – that she was promising him not just a noble but nobility… title, money, lands, respect, reckoning for the ‘hard dealing’ that had ruined his father and deprived him of his inheritance? The Dee dynasty could be restored and he would finally have the independence to develop new ideas, the resources to build up his library and the influence to found his scientific academy.
But nothing had been explicitly promised and there was no time to dwell on such dreams. Only a few days remained before the coronation date Dee had selected and frantic preparations were already underway There was such a surge in demand for crimson silk and cloth of gold and silver that customs officers were instructed to impound all available stock. Such an order would once have been carried out by Dee’s father Roland, but he was dead by 1555, before the change of regime could rehabilitate him.9
On the eve of the coronation, Elizabeth proceeded from the Tower of London to the Palace of Westminster, where she was to make her preparations for the ceremony. A series of magnificent pageants were performed on huge scaffolds erected along the route: at Gracechurch Street a ‘Pageant of the Roses’ represented the Tudor dynasty on a three-tiered platform; at Cornhill and Little Conduit a play on the theme of time. At Cheapside (somewhat inappropriately named for this occasion) she paused to receive a gift of a thousand gold marks, presented by the City Recorder. She passed through Temple Bar, an archway marking the City’s western limit, upon which were mounted huge statues of Gogmagog and Corineus, giants featured in the story of Brutus, a legendary king of ancient Britain who was to play a prominent part in Dee’s future explorations of British mythology.
The following morning, with the streets ‘new-laid with gravel and blue cloth and railed on each side,’10 Elizabeth appeared at the doors of Westminster Hall attired in coronation robes, made of cloth-of-gold, trimmed in ermine and stitched with jewels. Her auburn hair was down, emphasising her maidenly youth. She processed towards Westminster Abbey beneath a canopy carried by the Barons of the Cinque Ports, followed by nobles, heralds and bishops. The carpet upon which she trod, dusted with snow, disappeared as she went, the crowds lining the route scrambling to tear off samples to keep or sell as souvenirs.
Dee would have had his place in the Abbey, though not in the nave, which was reserved for the nobles who were called upon to declare Elizabeth’s rightful claim to the throne. Illuminated by thousands