I reproduce what remains of the letter in full:
– – – that hereby I (John Dee) do reveal to you – and to no other person on earth – this secret that is the proudest and at the same time most dangerous in my life. And this, if nothing else, should justify me in all that I undertake, and shall in future undertake, to the Honour and Glory of our most gracious Lady and virginal Majesty, Elizabeth, my great Queen.
In briefest summary:
When the Royal Princess received news of my desperate position she secretly sent – with a courage and circumspection to be found in no other child of her age – for our mutual friend Leicester and asked him to pledge his word as a nobleman to prove his courage and his love and loyalty to me. As she found him resolved and ready to sacrifice his own safety if necessary, she boldly set about delivering me from the Tower. And I believe, though I have no evidence to prove it, that it was through a childish excess of spirit that knew no danger, through a wildness that oftentimes seized her, that led her to do what was impossible, and yet the only possible means of rescuing me:
At night, using both true and copied keys – Heaven knows how she came by them! – she crept secretly into the royal chancellery, King Edward at that time being particularly close in both friendship and cooperation to Bishop Bonner. She found the chest, wherein was kept the King’s own paper with a royal watermark, opened it and wrote, imitating the King’s own hand, an order for my immediate release which she sealed with Edward’s own Seal – in what manner she obtained it I do not know, it being always kept locked away.
All this she did herself boldly and yet with care and caution since there was never the least doubt cast upon the document – indeed, King Edward himself, when it was later presented to him, was so confounded to see a product of his own hand of which he knew nothing that it seemed to him as if it had been written by magic, and he silently accepted it as his own. It may be that he saw through the counterfeit but condoned it rather than admit to such sorcery or presumption in his own immediate vicinity, – however that may be, the next morning Robert Dudley, later Earl of Leicester, strode into Bonner’s registry, handed over his urgent missive and insisted on receiving both reply and prisoner from the episcopal court himself. And he did!
Neither I nor any man ever learnt what was in the supposed letter from King Edward, devised and written by a sixteen-year-old child. What I do know is that, in the presence of Dudley, as the emissary of the King, the Bloody Bishop, ashen-faced and trembling, gave his bodyguard orders to hand me over. And that is all, dearest friend, that I may reveal to you. And from this, which I have only set down after much hesitation, you can see whence comes the “eternal obligation” to our gracious and sublime Queen, of which I have often spoken to you ...
That is the end of the fragment.
In John Dee’s diary the illegible section is followed by this short passage:
That very morning the words of Bartlett Greene were fulfilled; without delay and without formality I was released from my grim situation and led from the Tower by the companion of my youth, Robert Dudley, and taken to a safe place where even the Bloody Bishop would scarce think me hid and where he would have found it difficult to take me if he should come to regret his compliance regarding the release of my person. I will make no further commentary on the matter, nor even presume to explain secundam rationem the mysterious ways in which God moves. I will only add that, besides the incredible boldness and skill of my saviours and God’s visible assistance, Bishop Bonner’s state of mind after the execution of Bartlett Greene also played some role in the matter. I heard from the Bishop’s chaplain – through what intermediary need not trouble us – that Bonner spent a sleepless night: for hours he paced up and down in his chamber in a restless perturbation of the spirit and then fell into a strange delirium in which he seemed to suffer the most indescribable horrors. He spoke, as if with an invisible guest, in despairing, often incomprehensible tones and for hours fought a desperate battle with all kinds of imagined demons; finally he cried out, “I confess that I cannot command thee, and I confess that I am consumed by Fire – Fire – Fire!” At this the chaplain rushed in to find him unconscious on his bed. I will not record the many rumours that have come to me on this matter. What I heard is so terrible that I think my soul would faint with the torment if I should even try to set it down on paper.
Thus ends John Dee’s report on “The Silver Shoe of Bartlett Greene”.
A few days away in the country and rambling in the mountains have done me the world of good. On a sudden impulse I left my desk, the meridian line and old Uncle Dee’s dusty relics behind me and broke free of the spell that had bound me to house and work.
Isn’t it funny, I said to myself as I strode out over the heather-covered foothills, that I feel the same as John Dee must have felt when he walked over the Scottish moors after his release from prison? And I had to laugh at the idea that kept going through my mind: John Dee must have tramped over moorland just like this, just as happy, with his heart almost bursting with the new sense of freedom, just like mine as I trot
