The Angel of the West Window Read online

  Tutor to men of my own age, often older, my Collegium Graeciae was more often a Collegium Bacchi et Veneris than a Collegium Officii. And truly, even now a laugh comes to my lips when I think of the performance of Pax by the ancient author of comedies, the divine Aristophanes. It was acted out by my pupils and colleagues, with most magical effects. According to the poet’s instruction I constructed a giant Scarabeus of fearsome appearance, which had, concealed within its body, a machine so that my dung beetle rose straight up in the air and flew with great din and stench over the heads of the terrified superstitious onlookers to bring the messenger to the Palace of Jupiter.

  How the good Fellows and Professors, not to mention the honest burghers and magistrates, did wonder greatly and in fear and trembling did pray to all the Saints for protection against such wonders and the Black Arts of the insolent young magician, John Dee.

  Had I harkened to the noise, laughter, hubbub and uproar of that day with a more attentive ear, I might have learned more of the way of this world in which I am condemned to live. For the mob, which governs this world, responds to high spirits and harmless pranks with bitter hatred and the deathly earnest of its vengeance.

  That night they stormed my house to take me, whom they thought must be in league with the Devil, and drag me before their court of witless judges. And the Dean and Chapter led the mob, cawing like black carrion crows, all to punish the “blasphemy” of a lighthearted mechanick! And had it not been for Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, my friend and the worthy Master of the College, who knows, but the mob – both learned and profane – might have parted me from my life at that very hour and slaked their lust on streams of my blood.

  But I escaped on a swift horse to my stronghold of Deestone and then once more over the sea to the great School of Louvain. Behind me I left an honourable office, a modest income and a name dragged through the mire by the foul suspicions and vicious calumnies of the justified and the pious. In those days I cared too little for the slanders hissed abroad by men beneath my station and whom I therefore thought of no account. I had but little knowledge of the world; it was only through bitter experience that I learnt that no-one is born too high nor any slanderer too low, but that the enmity of an even greater might not bind the two together and distil from the venom of the guttersnipe poison for the nobleman.

  O my peers, how bitter was the lesson that taught me to know them!

  Chemistry and alchymy were the objects of my study at Louvain and I learnt all that there was to be learnt about the nature of matter. And then I had constructed there for me – it cost me a pretty penny – a laboratory wherein I could study the natural and divine mysteries of the world in solitary peace. Therein I acquired much knowledge and understanding of the elementa naturae.

  I was magister liberarum artium, and as the foolish, venomous rumours from England could scarcely pursue me this far, I was soon held in high honour by both the learned and unlearned; and when, in the autumn, I delivered lectures on astronomy at the College of Louvain, I counted amongst my auditory the Dukes of Mantua and Medina Celi who, especially to hear me, came every week from Brussels where the Emperor Charles V was keeping court. And several times His Majesty was Himself amongst the audience and would not permit the least change to be made to the normal order of the collegii for His sake. Also foremost amongst my hearers were Sir William Pickering, a learned and honourable gentleman from my own country, and Matthew Haco and John Capito from Denmark. And in those days it happened that I advised the Emperor to leave the Low Countries for a while, since I saw, by certain unmistakable signs such as I had studied before, that a plague would visit the land in the damp of the winter; and I faithfully reported this danger to the Emperor. Charles was astounded and laughed and refused to believe the prophecy. And many gentlemen of his entourage seized the chance to rob me, by mockery and slander, of the Emperor’s good opinion, which had long caused the worm of jealousy to gnaw at their vitals. But it was the Duke of Medina Celi who, in his solicitude, urged the Emperor not to disregard my warning. For when I understood his good opinion of me, I showed the Duke certain signs on which I based my prophecy.

  Soon after the turn of the year the signs of the plague increased so much that the Emperor left his camp in Brussels in great haste and soon departed the country, not without requesting my company and, when I was forced to refuse the honour because of other, urgent plans, rewarding me with a most flattering and princely gift of gold and a golden chain with a medallion bearing his own fair likeness.

  Soon after that the coughing death arose in Holland and raged in town and country so that thirty thousand were dead within two months.

  I had fled the plague myself and moved to Paris. There Turnebus, the philosophers Peter Ramus and Ranconetus, the great physician Fernet and the mathematician Peter Nonius were all my pupils in Euclidian geometry and astronomy. Soon King Henry XI too entered the hall and wanted to sit at my feet like the Emperor Charles in Louvain. The Duke of Monteluc brought me the offer of the Rectorship of an Academy that would be founded especially for me or of a Chair at the Sorbonne with many promises for the future.

  But all this was like a game to me and in my pride I rejected the offers with a laugh. My dark star was drawing me back to England, for in Louvain Nicholas Grudius, Privy Chamberlain to the Emperor Charles, had found, I know not where, a weird Scottish piper – could it have been Bartlett Greene’s mysterious shepherd? – who urged me that I was destined to rise to the highest honours in England. This prophecy etched itself upon my soul and seemed to have a magical meaning for me which I could not explain. Whatever the cause, I could hear it constantly in my ear and it aroused my ambitious lust. And so I returned and entered upon the dangerous and bloody trial of strength between the Papists and the Protestants which, from the Royal Palace down to to the least village, set brother against brother and man against wife. I threw in my lot with the Reformers and thought in a swift assault to win the love and the hand of Elizabeth, who sympathised with the Protestant party. I have already recorded on the pages of other notebooks how my venture failed and need not repeat it here.

  In the days following my release – it would be better to say my escape – from the Tower where Bishop Bonner had had me in his grasp, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, the best friend I ever had in my whole life, kept me company in his Peel Tower in the Sidlaw hills and shortened the long hours with repeated accounts of the plottings and actions that led to my rescue. And my greedy ears could not hear enough of the youthful audacity and bold resolution which Princess Elizabeth had displayed. For I knew much, much more than Dudley could even suspect. I knew, and I could hardly keep the jubilation from my voice, that Princess Elizabeth had done everything for me, had done as much and more than if it had been for herself – had she not drunk the love potion which Mascee and the witch of Uxbridge had prepared from my body fluids?!

  I was uplifted by this thought, and by the assurance of the power of the potion which seemed confirmed by the Princess’ incredibly audacious act. With magical power I had contrived, through my essence distilled in a potion, to penetrate Elizabeth’s soul and will, and to lodge there so that I could never more be driven out and, truly, have not up to this very day been driven out, despite all the stumbling blocks an unfathomable fate has cast in my way.

  “Do or die!” – that had been my father’s lifelong motto and he had inherited it from his father who had it from my great grandfather; the device seems to be as old as the Dee family itself. And “Do or die!” had been my resolve from the days of my youth and the spur to all my deeds and my successes in chivalry as in scholarship. “Do or die!” – that device had made me when still young in years the teacher and adviser to Kings and Emperors and, I may justly add, one of the foremost masters of natural and occult sciences my country, indeed, the age has produced. “Do or die!” – prised me from the claws of the Inquisition ...

  What foolish prattle! Can I name one important thing which I have done in thirty years?! In
the years of my virile prime?! – Where is the crown of England? Where is the sovereignty over Greenland – and over the states in the West that today are named after a penniless sailor: The Lands of Amerigo Vespucci?!

  I will skip over the five miserable years during which a fickle fate allowed the consumptive Mary to give the Papists a brief respite to reestablish their false and intolerant rule and plunge England into a vain turmoil of strife.

  As far as my own life was concerned, those years seemed like a gift from the wisdom of Providence to teach me to curb my passions, for I used the quiet, to which I was compelled, to pursue in depth the studies and preparations necessary to my Greenland scheme. I was assured of my triumph, assured that my – that our – time would come, the time of the glorious Queen and of me, her consort chosen by prophecy and fate.

  When I think back, I feel that this prophecy must have been in my blood since birth. My childhood was full of the secret knowledge of my royal destiny, and perhaps it was because of this blind conviction, passed on to me through the blood, that it never occurred to me to test the claims on which it was grounded.

  Yet even today, after so many defeats and disappointments, this knowledge and certainty in the innermost depths of my soul is no whit shaken, however much the facta seem to testify against me.

  But do they?

  Today I feel a compulsion to draw up an account of my fortune, like a merchant, wherein I may set out honestly all the claims of my mind and my will and the successes of my life on the debit and credit leaves of my ledger of fate. For I feel an inner voice urging me to take stock of my life.

  There is no evidence I can adduce, no documents or memories, to support my opinion that even my earliest childhood was marked by my certainty that I was bound up with some throne; and that could only be the throne of England, I repeat to myself again and again, for there is something within me that quells all doubt. It may well be that my father, Rowland Dee, in the manner of noblemen who have come down in the world and foresee a miserable end to their line, often praised the rank and reputation of his forebears with high-sounding words and made much of our relationship to the Boleyns and the Greys. But he principally did so when the royal bailiffs had once more come to distrain another meadow or patch of woodland. It can hardly be the memory of these humiliations that fed the fires of my dreams of future glory.

  And yet the first token and the first prophecy of my future came from within myself, namely from the glass in which I saw myself, filthy and befuddled with drink, after the celebration of my degree. The words that the ghostly image spoke to me on that occasion still ring in my ears; neither the image nor the words seemed to come from me, for I saw myself in the glass as a separate person from the one I was, and I heard the words coming not from my own lips, but from my companion in the glass. There is no delusion of the senses in this, nor of the memory, for I suddenly went stone cold sober from head to toe when the jack i’the glass addressed me.

  Added to this is the strange prophecy the witch of Uxbridge spoke to Lady Elizabeth. Later the Princess herself sent me a secret copy through the mediation of my friend, Robert Dudley, to which she had added three words, which today as then I bear inscribed on my heart: verificatur in aeternis. And then there were the even clearer hints and promises of my destiny that Bartlett Greene revealed to me in the Tower and confirmed by unmistakable signs – Bartlett Greene who, as I well know today, was an initiate of the mysteries whose adepts are still to be found in the Scottish Highlands. He greeted me as the “Royal Youth”; often I am gripped by the notion that this expression can, nay must, be interpreted in terms of alchymical symbols, and that the “crown” that was promised me is other than a physical earthly crown. Greene, an ignorant butcher, opened my eyes to the significance of the Nordic Thule, Greenland, as a bridge to the immeasurable lands and treasures of the Indian Continent of which the adventurers, Columbus and Pizarro, had discovered but the smallest and most worthless part and subjected it to the Spanish throne. He showed me the riven crown of the Western Sea, of England and northern America, that is to be made whole, and the King and Queen, conjoined and united on the thrones of the Islands and the New Indies.

  And again I am seized by the thought: is all this to be understood in an earthly sense?

  And it was he – not only in the Tower but twice since when he appeared bodily before me and spoke to me face to face – who planted Rhodri’s motto in my breast and fixed it there, as if with an iron clamp: “Do or die!”

  And he it was who shook me out of my lethargy for one last endeavour, one supreme exertion, and it was he who, with all the silver-tongued power of an eloquence as clear as the fountainhead of all knowledge and as refreshing as an icy spring on a fevered brow, lured me on and tempted me to prevail upon my Queen whenever the irresolute side of her nature seemed to draw her back trembling from the brink of decision.

  Yet again the thought seizes me: is all this to be understood in an earthly sense merely?

  But as it is here my purpose to relate everything in its true time and place, I will return to my scrutiny of my past life to see if I can find the cause of the failure of these my most fervent endeavours.

  After the death of Queen Mary, which fell in my thirty-third year, my time seemed to have come. At that time, too, I had drawn up in great detail all my plans for a military expedition to take Greenland and to station there a garrison which would serve as a bridgehead for the conquest of the northern regions of America. Not the least circumstance – geographical, navigational or military – that might serve to prosper or hinder such a great enterprise had been forgotten and all had been prepared for an immediate expansion of the power and sovereignty of England.

  The beginning was most propitious. In November of the year of her accession, 1558, the young Queen commanded me through my friend Dudley, now Earl of Leicester, to prepare a horoscope for the day of her coronation in Westminster Abbey. I took it as a sign of her friendship for me and was fired with zeal to seek in the configurations of the stars and constellations testimony both of her ascent to power and glory, and of our joint royal destiny, vouchsafed me by the prophecies.

  This horoscope, whose miraculous configurations did, indeed, presage a matchless blossoming and harvest for Elizabeth’s reign and for England, brought me, beside the warmest praises and a considerable gift of money, hints of an even greater reward from my royal mistress. The purse I tossed aside to a servant, but I hoarded the many secret tokens of her favour which she repeatedly sent to me through Leicester and which confirmed in me the assurance of a speedy fulfilment of all my dreams.

  But – nothing was fulfilled!

  Queen Elizabeth began to play with me and to this day there is no end to the cat-and-mouse game in sight. At what cost to my energy, to my peace of mind and trust in God and the eternal powers, to my strength of purpose, to all my lower and higher faculties, this account can never reveal. A force strong enough to build a new world and destroy the old was wasted.

  Above all, the fawning title of the “Virgin” Queen, which she soon heard from all sides caressing her ear, and which fashion quickly transformed into nothing less than a cypher for majesty itself, so enraptured her that she resolved to honour the name in all she did. Her untamed nature and her love of her own freedom nourished this fatal posture although, on the other side, it clashed with her strong fleshly desires; soon her body screamed for carnal satisfaction, and her lust often took the most perverted forms.

  And once, shortly before our first violent falling-out, I was desired to come to Windsor Castle – I am sure I was not mistaken in this – to meet with her unchaperoned. On a sudden impulse I declined, for my ambition was not to spend the night with a virgin on heat, but to share in her royal dignity in the clear light of day.

  It may well be, then, that the rumours are true and that my friend Robert Dudley was more accommodating and took the pleasures I denied to both myself and the object of my spiritual desire. God alone knows whether I chose well or n
ot.

  It was much later and at the urgent command of Bartlett Greene – the unborn, undead, who comes and goes at will – that I finally drew down upon my head the thunderbolt of her wrath, the threat of which had so long sucked at my strength and which would anyway have struck sooner or later; maybe it was foreordained if not foreseen. Although my vital force and peace of mind had been shattered beyond recall, I did survive the thunderbolt, and who can say whether at another hour or under another constellation her curse might not have totally destroyed me?

  However that may be, today I am but the ruin of my former self. Only today I know against whom I must struggle.

  Elizabeth continued to treat me in a cruel and capricious manner and when she once more broke her promise to command me to Windsor for conferences on weighty matters of state, instead of for tittle-tattle and teasing love-making, I decided in a fit of anger to leave England once again and go to the Emperor Maximilian in Hungary to offer that enterprising monarch my plans for the conquest and settlement of the northern parts of America.

  During the journey, however, I was filled with contrition and I felt I had betrayed the innermost secret I shared with my Queen, and something warned me, and drew me back as if some magic umbilical cord still bound me to my Lady’s womb.

  So I merely explained to the Emperor some of my ideas on astrology and alchymy in order to secure a position for some months as Imperial mathematician and astrologer. But our signs could not be brought into conjunction, and the next year, the fortieth of my life, I returned to England and found forgiveness from Elizabeth, who was as sweetly alluring and as coldly, regally proud as ever. I spent days of deep satisfaction as her guest in Greenwich; for the first time she bent a willing ear to my propositions and accepted the fruits of my learning with earnest gratitude. She promised me her protection against all who secretly plotted to harm me and I was soon drawn into the intimate circle that was privy to all her plans, hopes and fears.