Notes from the later years of John Dee, Esq.
Anno Domini 1578.
Today, the Feast of the Resurrection of Our Lord, I, John Dee, rose early from my bed and slipped silently out of the chamber so that I should not disturb Jane, my – second – wife, nor my beloved baby son Arthur, who was sleeping in his cradle.
I felt an inward urge to go out into the mild silver light of the awakening spring morning. I could not say what drove me out of house and farm, unless it were the thought of the evil that had befallen me on this same Easter morning twenty-eight years ago.
I have great cause to give up my heartfelt thanks to fate or, as it is more seemly to say, to Divine Providence and Mercy, that has allowed me life and health in this, my fifty-seventh year, to enjoy the glorious vision of the sun as it rises above the eastern horizon.
Most of those who had designs against me are long since dead, and all that remains of Edmund Bonner, the Bloody Bishop, is the loathing of the people wherever the old stories are told; when children misbehave, their nurses tell them that the Bloody Bishop will come to fetch them.
But what has become of me and of the prophecies and of all that I strove for in the vigour of my youth? – – – I would rather not reflect on the passing years and how my plans and projects – and my strength – have gone with them.
In such thoughts, which oppressed me more than they had for many a year, I wandered along the banks of the Surrey Dee, which, I presume, once gave its name to our family; and the comical haste of the Dee, a mere bustling brook, reminded me of the all too rapid flow of human endeavour. Eventually I came to the place where the stream, winding its many twisting curves around the hillock at Mortlake, spreads out in an old claypit forming a kind of reedy pool. The Dee seems to have come to a standstill and disappeared in a swamp.
I stopped beside the marshy pool and spent I know not how long gazing at the reeds stirring in the breeze over this haunt of frogs and toads. I was filled with feelings of dissatisfaction and my head began to throb with the notion that here in the fate of the Dee Brook was a reflection, a visible symbol of the fate of the John Dee who was standing there beside it: a rapid course to an early swamp, stagnant water, frogs, toads, weed and reeds – and above it in the gentle sun a shimmering dragon-fly on jewelled pinions: but when you catch the trumpery marvel, all you hold in your hands is a horrid grub with transparent wings.
As I became immersed ever deeper in such thoughts, my eye fell on a damselfly that was just emerging from its dull brown larva in the warmth of the spring morning. For a few brief seconds the insect clung trembling to the yellowing reed-stem close by the place where the larva, now an abandoned, ghost-like husk, had attached itself for its birth-in-death. The delicate wings were soon drying in the warm sunshine: after a series of upward jerks they unfolded daintily and smoothed themselves out with dreamy movements against the busy polishing of the back legs, gave a voluptuous shudder then – suddenly the tiny elf rose with a flash of colour and the next moment it was darting to and fro in ecstatic flight through the balmy air. The brittle husk of the larva hung on the dry reed-stem above the stagnant decay of the pond – dead.
“That is the secret of life”, I cried out loud. “Once more the immortal part has sloughed its skin, once more the victorious will has broken out of its prison to seek its destiny.”
And suddenly I saw myself many times in a long train of images disappearing into the mists of my past life; squatting in the Tower with Bartlett Greene; hunting rabbits or hunched over musty tomes in Robert Dudley’s Scottish mountain hide-out; in Greenwich, putting together horoscopes for the wild, untameable Lady Elizabeth; – – – bowing and scraping and holding forth before the Emperor Maximilian in Buda in Hungary; spending months of foolish mystery-mongering with Nikolaus Grudius, private secretary to the Emperor Charles, and even more privately an adept of the Rosicrucian order. I saw myself in the flesh, but as it were frozen in the various stages of my pilgrimage: exposed to ridicule, in fear and trembling, distraught and numb of soul: ill in the house of the Duke of Lorraine in Nancy; in Richmond, burning with ambition, love, hopes and plans for Her, a Lady hot and yet ice-cold, now blazing with determination, now smouldering with distrust, a Lady ...
And I saw myself at the bedside of my first wife, my enemy, the unfortunate Ellinor, as she wrestled with Death; and I saw myself quietly slip away from her death cell and out into the garden at Mortlake to – to her – to Elizabeth!
Puppet! – Phantom! – Ghost!! – And all myself; yet not myself, but a brownish grub desperately fixing its claws into the earth, now here, now there, to await the birth of the Other, the True John Dee, the winged Conqueror of Greenland, the Royal Youth with the world at his feet!
Again and again the wriggling grub and never the bridegroom! O youth! O fire! O my Queen!
Thus was the morning stroll of a fifty-seven-year-old man who
