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
