John Dee: A 17th Century Morality Tale

O what pity that such a man should fall into such a delusion! ~ Méric Casaubon

If you visit Mortlake and wander into the St. Mary’s church, you will find a plaque that reads:

 

Near this place lie the remains of John Dee MA, Clerk in Holy Orders 1527 ~ 1609. Astronomer, Geographer, Mathematician, Adviser to Queen Elizabeth I

It was placed there by the John Dee of Mortlake Society in 2013 but is probably closer to the way Dee was regarded in his lifetime than the image we have of him today.

When he died in genteel poverty, John Dee didn’t have quite the reputation he was to acquire for later generations. He was renowned in academic circles as a highly respected scholar and for having had one of the biggest and best libraries in Europe. By merchants and explorers (he was a member of the Worshipful Company of Mercers) he was acclaimed for his work in navigation. To ordinary people he was probably most famous for once having been Queen Elizabeth’s advisor and astrologer. True, there had always been claims made about his supernatural prowess which he refuted strongly, but men of science often attracted such at that time—his acquaintance Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, was known as ‘the Wizard Earl’.

In Dee’s hometown of Mortlake many people spoke fondly of him as a kind man and a good neighbour. Aubrey in his Brief Lives recalls:

Old goodwife Faldo (a native of Mortlake in Surrey), aged eighty or more (1672), did know Dr Dee, and told me he died at his house in Mortlake… He was a great peacemaker; if any of the neighbours fell out, he would never let them alone till he had made them friends. He was tall and slender. He wore a gown like an artist’s gown, with hanging sleeves, and a slit. A mighty good man he was.

 

The goodwife also mentioned that children dreaded him because he was accounted a conjurer. But children, then and now, say such things about old people who live in creepy houses. Clearly that was not the view of many of his adult neighbours.

It is possible, that if things had remained as they were at his death, we might today recall Dee mostly for his groundbreaking work in navigation; for his influential Mathematical Preface; for being the first to speak of a British Empire; or for his skill with cyphers. Perhaps we might have given little more thought today to John Dee’s alchemical and occult interests than we do to those of Sir Isaac Newton whose unpublished papers have revealed his passion for such.

What really set in motion Dee’s reputation as a master of the occult was not something that occurred in his own lifetime, but fifty years later. The image of John Dee that we have today was a product not of the 16th but of the 17th Century. Because, unlike Newton, whose secret occult experiments remained unexposed, John Dee’s were pulled into public awareness. That was done not to besmirch Dee’s reputation but to serve the propaganda purposes of another era: Dee’s diary was pressed into service to attack the Cromwellian regime.

In 1659 another renowned scholar called Méric Casaubon published a book. It had a catchy title as most books of the era tended to:

 

A true & faithful relation of what passed for many yeers between Dr. John Dee and some spirits: tending (had it succeeded) to a general alteration of most states and kingdomes in the world: his private conferences with Rodolphe Emperor of Germany, Stephen K. of Poland, and divers other princes about it: the particulars of his cause, as it was agitated in the Emperors court, by the Pope’s intervention: his banishment and restoration in part: as also the letters of sundry great men and princes (some whereof were present at some of these conferences and apparitions of spirits) to the said D. Dee…

 

For reasons I am sure I don’t need to explain, it is usually called: A true and faithful relation of what passed for many years between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits, or just A true and faithful relation. If you are interested, copies of it are widely available and you can find it to read for free at various locations online.

But what lay behind the publication of this explosive document in the turbulent 1650s?

John Dee died in 1609 and after his death his daughter, Katherine, held a sale of his remaining books and possessions. The rambling house in Mortlake, that was once home to his family and his library, stood empty for several years before it was turned into the famous Mortlake tapestry works.

But there were those who were sure that John Dee must have left secrets behind. Sir Robert Cotton, whose library contained such wonders as a copy of the Magna Carta with its seal still intact, the Lindisfarne Gospels and the only known original of Beowulf, dug in the grounds of the house like a treasure hunter. Perhaps he had a map with ‘X marks the spot’ because he apparently found a chest containing some manuscripts, including the carefully kept record of John Dee’s attempts to communicate with angels.

These sat in Cotton’s library for the next four and a half decades, along with the table Dee had used for his scrying, surprisingly unremarked and bringing to mind the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Surprisingly, because at one point the privy council ordered a search and catalogue of the contents of the library, but clearly either missed Dee’s manuscript or dismissed it as irrelevant. Perhaps Cotton read the diary and shared it with a few others, or perhaps he had taken one look at the strange document and decided it was better left ignored. For Sir Robert, a great antiquarian, merely having such a thing in his collection was perhaps enough. His son, Thomas, inherited it along with the rest of the library in 1631.

The library was in the Cottons’ house at the heart of Westminster and was where Charles I was accommodated when on trial. In 1650, a year after the king’s execution, Thomas moved much of the contents of the library to his daughter-in-law’s house in Bedfordshire for greater safety in the uncertain times.

But he left Dee’s diary behind where it was found by Méric Casaubon.

Méric Casaubon was an interesting man. Before the wars he had been made a Doctor of Divinity, held several benefices, and was one of those Archbishop Laud had favoured. His father, Isaac Casaubon, had been welcomed to England by James VI/I, and was esteemed by the king for his theological path between Puritanism and Catholicism. That was the same religious perspective Méric also held—one that gave him a strong belief in the episcopal Church of England. Not a very popular view to hold in the 1650s when, under the rule of Cromwell, episcopacy was deemed as akin to Catholicism and outlawed.

Unsurprisingly, Méric Casaubon had kept a low profile in the civil war years. Much of the time he lived quietly in London where he had friends in the antiquarian community, friends such as the Parliamentarian John Selden and the Cottons. After the execution of King Charles, Casaubon refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the new regime but such was his reputation for scholarship, Cromwell asked him to write a history of the wars ‘according to the most impartiall accounts on both sides’. Casaubon’s son wrote of this:

 

My honoured father was too wise to be catcht by such a peece of finenes, too honest and Loyall to be soe tempted. He desyred Mr. Greves to tender his most humble service and hartie thanks to the Generall for this great honour, and to acquaint him that he was sorrie he was not capable to serve him as he desired, it being an employment quite against his Conscience; and that he could not doe it without such reflections as would be very unserviceable to his concerns.

 

In 1652, Casaubon’s wife died and he became ill with grief. Unable to manage, he sent his three year old daughter to be raised by relatives and he and his six year old son went to live in the Cottons’ Westminster house. It must have been balm to his scholar’s soul to have the run of the remains of the Cotton library and one can only wonder what he felt when he came upon John Dee’s startling diary. It is possible he had no wish to publish it at all. In a note to a friend, Casaubon wrote that it was ‘tedious, and full of impertinence and senseless stuffe, much lyke (in many places) the ranting language of the tymes, that was then in use’. So perhaps it was Cotton, whose hospitality he enjoyed, who pressed the work upon him. Or James Ussher who, as the preface makes clear, read it and approved publication.

Whether it was his own idea or not to see the diary in print, Casaubon took it as an opportunity to shape a weapon against the current religious dispensation. John Dee, he argued, was a profoundly good and religious man who strayed through the best of intentions but, acting without the guidance of an authoritative established church, he fell into the clutches of demons.

It can’t have been a fast or easy task taking the often obscure text, annotated with hastily scribbled notes and abbreviations, written in a mix of languages, and putting it into a form that would be suitable for the printer. Not to mention that the very nature of the material led him to a great deal of heart searching. The lengthy preface Casaubon wrote to the book is an in-depth justification for his part in publishing the diary. In it, he asks many of the same questions a modern historian might ask: Is this true? Is it a forgery? Was this man Kelley, who scryed for Dee for so many years and told him what the angels said, a conman? Should I publish all of it—even the sex scene?

The answers Casaubon gives, the justifications he found, were those of a man of his era. Yes, everyone knew there were many fraudulent psychics about, but demons were real, as they were mentioned in the Bible and by many great men and, besides, this diary would prove to atheists that spirits really do exist.

No, it was not likely to be a forgery as it was in Dee’s own hand and anyone reading even a quarter of the book would see the consistency of it. If anyone doubted that, they could come and see it, along with Dee’s scrying table, in the Cotton library.

Yes, Kelley could plausibly be cast as someone playing on Dee’s credulity, but he was himself renowned as a great magician. Not to mention that he couldn’t speak Latin but gave Latin messages from the spirits to Dee. Besides, Dee had other scryers who said the same kind of stuff.

And the sex scene? Well the diary implied that a ‘Promiscuous, carnal Copulation’ had occurred and that was surely needful to mention in order to prove how far the evil spirits went in corrupting their victim. It was the ultimate demonstration of how Dee, cut loose from the tethers of authoritative church guidance, was an easy victim of the devil.

And that was exactly what Casaubon wanted the book he published to show.

In the hands of Méric Casaubon John Dee’s life became a morality tale which Casaubon saw as an analogy for the religious chaos he discerned in the Cromwellian settlement. He wanted to use the diary to discredit the existence of the many dissenting and independent religious groups of the era and highlight his own belief for the need to return to a Church of England—and by implicit extension a restoration of the king as head of that church. In Casaubon’s view only such a strong authoritative church could provide much needed reliable guidance to keep people from falling into error as Dee had done.

Published in 1659, A true and faithful relation made shocking reading at the time and became something of a best seller. It played to the fears of many who felt there was real danger in the confusing chaos of fractious and fractured religious beliefs remaining unchecked. Perhaps it even played a part in the mood shift of the time that ultimately facilitated the Restoration.

Even today the diary makes shocking reading, though for different reasons. Contemporary readers might have been appalled that Dr Dee was communicating with demons and led into grievous sin. Modern readers are more likely to wonder how such an intelligent and apparently astute man could have been conned for so many years by an obvious charlatan and finally persuaded into an appalling pact of marital betrayal and coercion.

I doubt that many of Casaubon’s 17th-century readers, for all that Dee included her in his account, stopped to dwell on what it must have been like for John Dee’s wife, the woman at the heart of this. So to restore her voice, it is her experience that I have explored in a short story about the events Dee described as ‘pactum factum’—a pact fulfilled.

My story, A Pact Fulfilled, was long listed for the Dorothy Dunnett Society/Historical Writers Association short story award in 2023, Dorothy Dunnett’s Centenary Year. It is now published in the Historical Writers’ Forum anthology To Wear a Heart So White. Told from the perspective of Jane Dee, the story draws heavily on the original diary and explores how a terrible crime against her that could never be publicly acknowledged was punished in a fitting way.

Perhaps, like Méric Casaubon, I am again turning Dee’s diary into a morality tale.

 

About the Author

Eleanor Swift-Hook enjoys the mysteries of history and fell in love with the early Stuart era at university when she re-enacted battles and living history events with the English Civil War Society. Since then, she has had an ongoing fascination with the social, military and political events that unfolded during the Thirty Years’ War and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. She lives in County Durham and loves writing stories woven into the historical backdrop of those dramatic times.

Her six-book series, Lord’s Legacy, traces the story of Philip Lord, a mercenary commander with a reputation for ruthlessness gained in the wars raging across Europe, who has returned to England at the opening of what will become the First English Civil War. But he returns with a treason charge hanging over his head and in search of his identity and heritage. The truth about that lies in the hands of a mysterious cabal calling itself the Covenant, and their secret conspiracy which began a century before.

Her latest book, The Fugitive’s Sword, opens a new series, Lord’s Learning, set in the 1620s and 1630s against the backdrop of European conflict in the Thirty Years’ War and follows the development of Philip Lord from a boy of fifteen cast alone into those wars to becoming the man we meet in Lord’s Legacy. The second book in the series, The Soldier’s Stand will be released next year

You can learn more about Eleanor’s writing and the background to her books on her website: eleanorswifthook.com, or follow her on Twitter/X: @emswifthook