“Any potion that was drunk, if it were of free will and, perhaps, from an excess of high spirits, could not violate the laws of nature, nor those of the divine spirit. According to nature, anything harmful to the body is either the death of the body, or is killed by the body, which devours and discharges it. According to the law of the spirit, however, we are granted freedom over our will, so that our dreams, whether they feed the mind or are excretions from it, always come in fulfilment of our own will. Thus anything that was drunk without harm to the body is long since vanished; any dreams that were forced upon us will have been discharged by a healthy organism, so that we have every reason to hope that God will grant that Your Majesty will arise from any such afflictions strengthened in health and freedom.”
My speech had turned out bolder and more of a rebuff than I had intended when I began; I was afraid at the pale and severe features which stared at me from the pillows. However it was not anger I saw, but an unapproachable and alien grandeur which chilled me to the marrow; it seemed as if I heard the “spiritual” Queen speaking:
“You have wandered far from your destined course, scion of the line of Rhodri. At night you observe the stars in the sky above your roof in the cool light of reason; but you have forgotten that the way to them passes through the image of them that lies within you, and you do not realise that there are Gods there that would see you rise to join them. You have dedicated a learned treatise to me, De stella admiranda in Cassiopeia. Oh, John Dee, you admire too many things and have neglected to become a wonder of the cosmos yourself! But you were right in your supposition that the admirable star in Cassiopeia was a double star which revolves blissfully around itself, forever blazing forth and then drawing in upon itself, like the nature of love itself. Go on making your observations of the double star in Cassiopeia; I may soon leave this tiny Kingdom of the Islands to seek the riven crown which is reserved for me when I cross over – – –”
At these words I collapsed at my Mistress’ bedside and in my stupor was only half aware of what else was said between us.
But the Queen’s illness proved to be much worse than had been at first thought and the doctors began to despair of her life. Then I set out for Holland and Germany to seek the famous physicians who were known to me from Louvain and Paris, but none were to be found in the cities where they lived, so that I spent day and night galloping in search of them until news of Her Majesty’s recovery reached me in Frankfort on the Oder.
And so I returned for the third time from a fruitless expedition in my Mistress’ service and found my wife Jane had been delivered of a child, my dear son Arthur whom she bore me in the fifty-fifth year of my life.
Since that time my commerce with Queen Elizabeth and the court in London has been scanty and free of terrors as of joys, of sorrows as of the secret thrill of hope. My life in the last two years has flowed as smoothly as the little Dee outside my window – not without its pleasant aspects as it winds its way through the peaceful countryside, but without violent rapids or the majestic sweep of a mighty river in its destined course towards a distant ocean.
Last year Queen Elizabeth accepted one last tractatus from my pen: as a summation of my North American ambitions, which I had carefully planned in such rigorous detail, I dedicated to her the Tabula geografica Americae, in which I once more dwelt on the incalculable advantages of this enterprise, an opportunity to be seized which would never arise again. I have done all that lay in my power. If Her Majesty prefers the counsel of narrow-souled envy to that of friendship, then England will let this moment of destiny pass ungrasped. But I can wait, that I have learnt in my fifty years. Now it is Burleigh who has the ear of our Mistress – an ear that all too easily takes its cue from the eye and inclines itself to a handsome figure. There is no love lost between Burleigh and myself. I expect little from his judgment and less from his goodwill.
But there is another matter which serves to strengthen my composure, so that I no longer tremble at the decisions of the Privy Council. After the trials of all these years I have come to doubt whether it is the earthly Greenland that is the goal of my striving, the true object of the conquest prophesied me. Recently I have found cause to doubt whether I interpreted the words of my jack i’the glass aright; I have cause to distrust my satanic counsellor, Bartlett Greene, in spite of the accuracy of his supernatural foresight. His most devilish trick is to tell the truth, but in such manner that it is misunderstood. – – – This world is not the whole world, that was the message Greene gave me in the hour of his death. This world has a counterworld, a plurality of dimensions, which by no means exhaust themselves in the world of our bodies and our space; Greenland, too, has its mirror image, just as I do: on the other side. A Green Land! Are not my Greenland and my America over there? This thought has occupied reason and intuition since I sensed the other side. And Bartlett Greene’s insistence that I should seek the fount of being here alone, here
