April 20, 2019 • 23 mins
We're revisiting an episode from 2011 featuring previous hosts Sarah and Deblina. Born in 1527 to a Welsh family, John Dee grew to become one of Queen Elizabeth's most memorable advisors. Join Sarah and Deblina as they delve into the life and times of this scholar, statesman and sorcerer.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. We have an episode coming up in
the near future that's related to alchemy, so we've pulled
a couple of related classics out of the archive to
wet everyone's appetites. Today's is about John d who was
an advisor to Queen Elizabeth the First, possibly also her spy,
and somebody that is requested from listeners from time to time.
(00:23):
He is more often remembered not for being a spy
or an advisor, but for being maybe kind of an
alchemist sorcerer. So in this episode, Sarah and Deblina got
into why that is. This originally came out in October
as one of their Halloween episodes, so enjoy. Welcome to
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I
(00:45):
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Deblina Choco Boarding and I'm fair doubting, and we
promised our listeners some speaking kind of halloweenish episodes in October,
and it just so happens that I've gotten magic on
the brain recently because I was visiting with my ten
(01:08):
year old niece and she is finally requiring me to
do something that many people have done, which is read
Harry Potter. Oh, finally, I know. I know you've been
wanting that for a long time. Yes, been my long
cherished hope. She in bed and I read Harry hopefain
that I'll read it. She's wearing a wizard outfit right now. Actually,
(01:30):
So we wanted to look into some real life examples
of people who were said to have been involved with
magic and the occult. And John D, who was a
mathematician and astronomer from the sixteenth century, really piqued our interest,
not least of all because there's a new opera about him.
So this opera, which is called Dr D, premiered at
the Manchester International Festival in July, and it came about
(01:52):
when festival organizers approached the graphic novelist Alan Moore, who
is the creator of V for Vendetta and From Hell,
approached him to work on a new project about the
quote life of an obscure but important figure from English history. So,
more pondering on this, decided to focus on John D.
(02:14):
Of course, Moore didn't finish the project. He left before
it was completed. But Damon Albarn, singer and songwriter of
the band Blur and also guerrillas. He did finish it
along with director Rufus Norris, and we haven't heard or
seen it ourselves, but we've we did get kind of
stuck on that phrase obscure but important figure from English history.
(02:34):
I mean, that's exactly the type of person we love
to restuff. He missed in history class exactly, so there's
no denying that D was important. In addition to being
an accomplished mathematician, astronomer, geographer and navigator and also book collector,
he was an adviser to Queen Elizabeth the First and
probably a spy for her in some capacity, and also
(02:54):
an early proponent of expanding Britain into an empire. So
why is this guy with some legitimate resume entrees sometimes
dismissed as the queen's astrologer and necromancer and a sorcerer.
Well we're going to take a look at that, but
first we need to find out how he got to
work for the queen in the first place. So it
started with schooling and he was born. John D was
(03:16):
born July fifty seven in London. His father, Roland, was
of Welsh descent and was probably some kind of merchant.
So John D started his studies at a school in
Chelmsford in Essex in fifteen thirty five, and then went
on to St John's College in Cambridge in fifteen forty two,
(03:37):
where he studied a pretty impressive lineup of Greek, Latin philosophy, geometry,
arithmetic and astronomy. And from the beginning he was really
dedicated to his studies, especially when you consider how young
he was at the time. He really seemed to love
to learn, especially when it came to studying mathematics. And
(03:57):
just to give you an example of young on Dye's
typical day. According to his biographer Benjamin Woolley, d would
work at his studies about eighteen hours a day, leaving
just four hours for sleep and two hours for meals.
So a busy child, and by all accounts he was
an extremely talented scholar. Some even call him a genius.
(04:19):
So I guess all that hard work of has really
paid off. He got both his bachelor's and master's degrees
from St John's in fifteen forty five and fifteen forty
eight respectively. In fifteen forty six he was made one
of the founding fellows of Trinity College in Cambridge, but
then he switched stuff up a little bit. He left
England from fifteen forty eight to fifteen fifty one. He
continued his scientific education on the continent, and he studied
(04:42):
with a variety of top experts and a number of
different fields, including cartography and mathematics. He published astronomy texts
and lectured on Euclid's elements. Euclid, of course, was a
Greek mathematician and sometimes called the father of geometry and
d is sometimes credited with popularizing Euclidean geometry and academic circles.
He was also said to be an early supporter of
(05:04):
Copernicus's heliocentric model of the universe. So he was out
promoting sort of revolutionary He was out learning and kind
of yeah, thinking about and talking about cutting edge ideas.
It was interesting, though he turned down to mathematical professorships,
one at the University of Paris in fifteen fifty one
(05:25):
and another one that was offered to him at the
University of Oxford in fifteen fifty four. It's unclear exactly
why he did this. He seems to have had designs
on landing a position with the English crown, though as
we'll see later, probably hoped that that setup would result
in financial support or patronage that would allow him to
pursue his own research, so that seemed to work at first.
(05:46):
He was aiming higher. Yeah, it did seem to work
at first, And when d returned to England in fifteen
fifty one, he was able to associate himself at the
Royal court and he offered his math instruction to courtiers
and to navig gators, and that same year he was
presented to King Edward the six who granted him a
pension of one hundred crowns, which D later exchange for rectorship,
(06:11):
which had a nice comfortable living associated with it. Um,
So yeah, it seems like he was doing well for himself.
He made friends at court, he received the patronage of
a couple of them, including the Duchess of Northumberland, and
soon he started to get caught up in things though,
the intrigue that was going on at the time regarding
Queen Mary's ascension to the throne and the tensions going
(06:32):
on in England between the Catholics and the Protestants. But
Deep played his cards right, and at least at first
he didn't appear to take sides, which obviously during this
time could mean a swift execution. Yeah. So when Queen
Mary the First, who was Catholic, took the throne, de
served as a consultant and astrologer to her. So we
(06:53):
should stop here, though and talk about it a little bit,
because you're probably thinking, whoa wait a second, astrology. I
thought you said D was into astronomy. I have a
whole different opinion of him now. But before you go
judging him, we have to give you a little background
by way of explanation. Around this time, there wasn't such
a distinct line between astronomy and astrology. Many people like
(07:14):
D put stock in both. In fact, even though people
were coming out of the Dark Ages in the sixteenth century,
reason and science still existed right alongside superstition and magic.
So he wasn't the only one to feel this way
or to have these beliefs. And they'll get too upset
about Dark Ages people. I know everyone sometimes gets riled
(07:35):
up with that, but I think it's a good illustrative
term for discussing coming out of this real superstitious, magical time. Yeah,
it's illustrative. So just to give you an example of
what D's beliefs were like, he believed that the positions
of the planets at the moment of a person's birth
would affect their future, so like astrology, but he was
(07:57):
driven to find scientific explanation for this, and it was
this need to understand it all that really shaped his
whole career. So we're gonna two essentially, and so he
was asked to use these astrology skills for Queen Mary.
He was asked to cast horoscopes for her and for
her husband, Philip the second of Spain. Around that time, though,
(08:18):
D also started a correspondence with the Protestant Princess Elizabeth,
Mary's half sister, and he did an astrological chart for
her too. Soon after this, maybe coincidentally, maybe not. In
May a, fifteen fifty five, D was arrested and imprisoned
at Hampton Court, a week or so before Elizabeth faced
a similar similar situation, and the charge against him may
(08:41):
be different depending on what source you look at. I've
seen it as conjuring, and then I've seen it in
other places as simply calculating just to explain that, and
mathematics was kind of considered a form of black magic
by some at that time, so that's why calculating would
have been a criminal charge. He was acquitted after this
and released soon after though, and he went back to
work for Mary, which kind of amazes me. Yeah, he
(09:03):
kept on working for Mary, and he was loyal to
her until she died in fifty eight, and then when
Elizabeth the First became queen after that, d immediately shifted
his allegiance to her. It's likely most people think that
he may have supported her all along, but regardless, it's
interesting to see that he showed loyalty to kind of
(09:23):
whoever was in power because it was best for him,
especially since it seems like it would be difficult for
an astrologer to show loyalty to two people. What are
you going to tell somebody that there their cards don't
look so great or their stars aren't aligned. Maybe just
avoid the conversation. It would be a it would be
a tricky conversation to have. So with Elizabeth, he became
(09:52):
kind of a scientific and medical advisor to her, known
officially as the Queen's Intelligencer or the Royal Astrologer, and
she him to use his astrological skills to pick the
data for coordination, and obviously it worked out, so she
was happy with the result and She promised him security,
but always kind of kept him at arm's length, like
she didn't want to be too closely associated with his
(10:15):
involvement in the occult. But de still had that dream
of royal patronage, and especially a dream of creating this
huge royal library that would be available to everyone with
the goal of advancing learning. But he couldn't get official
support for that, so finally he just decided to build
his own private library and spent several years abroad collecting
(10:37):
books for it. By the mid fifteen sixties he had
set up a laboratory and a library near London, and
the library had more than four thousand books in it
and was the largest private library in England at the time.
But d kept to his original intention. He was really
generous with it. He made it accessible to scholars. He
had a pretty significant collection of astronomic cole instruments, a
(11:01):
collection of globes, so this was all suddenly um at
the fingertips of England scholars, which was a great boon
for them and for him too. During the next twenty
years or so, D was involved in a number of
let's say practical or more scientific compared yes. He edited,
for example, the first English translation of Euclid's Elements in
(11:24):
fifteen seventy. He also observed Tico Brahe's Supernova fifteen seventy two,
and if you would like to know a little bit
more about that, you can reference art Tico Brahy podcast
from last December. So he observed this as well, and
he offered some trigger a metric methods for fighting its
distance from Earth. So he kind of helped to the
(11:44):
discussion absolutely, and he recommended that England adopt the Gregorian
calendar in eighty two, although no one really listened to
him at the time. And during this entire period he
was also helping lay the groundwork for English exploration by
preparing just also sorts of nautical information, including maps and
charts for navigation in the polar regions, as well as
(12:05):
teaching ship captains and crews about the principles of navigation
and giving them navigational instruments. So this allowed them to
venture out on routes that were away from the coast
and really encouraged exploration. I kind of see him as
a coach almost to all of these advisors. You know,
somebody who's got the brains and knows all of the
(12:26):
specifics for all of these diverse sciences and can help
the people actually making the decisions make the correct decision.
And just a little side note if you're interested in
such things. Uh D was probably an advisor on Sir
Francis Drake's voyages as well, so that's another impressive entry
for his resume. But along those same lines, D was
(12:46):
a really big advocate of building a British empire, and
that sort of makes sense if you consider his involvement
in all the navigation stuff. He expressed those views, those
views for an empire in a work called Perfect of Navigation.
But just because he was working on navigation and empire
building didn't mean that he had left math and physics
(13:08):
and astrology and magic um to just linger there and
not be worked on. He published something called the Propa
Dumata Afrostica in fiftifty eight, which contained his views on
those subjects math and physics and magic and things like that,
and that's not all he had going on. Many sources
also suggest that throughout this period D was working with
(13:31):
none other than Sir Francis Walsingham as a spy for
the English crown, and uh that's kind of it's kind
of a surprise, isn't it It is, It just takes
the story in a completely different direction. An article in
Military History by Adam Mandelbaum, for example, suggests that it
was D, along with Walsingham, who founded the British Secret
(13:55):
Intelligence Service. I mean, talk about having an entry on
your resume. That's somethinging that you wouldn't expect for someone
who's labeled a sorcerer and a conjuror not at all.
But he was probably able to use both his scientific
and his more supernatural skills to act as a spy
and to work in this capacity because for the more
(14:16):
scientific part of things. Mondel Bomb suggests that D was
kind of like a sixteenth century version of James Bond
gadget master Q. He would create all kinds of cool devices,
including this mechanical flying bird, which might not have been
used for spying, but it still sounds pretty neat. Um.
So you know that that very practical side of him
(14:36):
had an outlet in this. Speaking of James Bond, there
is another James Bond connection here that's kind of interesting,
and I couldn't really find it in any great academic
sources or anything, so I thought I'd just put it
out there that if you happen to look up D
and double oh seven on the Internet, you might find
some interesting stuff there. Some say that he actually used
(14:59):
that double oh seven sign and his secret correspondence to
the Queen. The two ohs would symbolize his eyes and
the seven was just a sacred or lucky number to him.
I like that. Maybe some tutor experts can let us
know if there's any truth behind that. Here's what we
do know, though. D also discovered this work while he
(15:20):
was searching for books abroad, and it was the Staganigraphia
of Johannas Trauthemius, a German abbott and magician of the
late fifteenth century. It was divided into three books, all
of which were apparently concerned with the evocation of angels,
and this was a topic that D was very interested in.
We'll tell you more about that later. But the first
(15:40):
two parts actually turned out to be hoaxes. They were
really the subject of them was really secret codes, and
only the third part was actually about contacting spirits. So,
according to mondel Baouma's article, D used this code to
communicate with Walsingham and disguise the intelligence he'd gathered throwing
some symbols associated with alchemy in there too. That was
(16:01):
in the mix so that people would think that they
were magical writings. It's why some people think of him
more as a master spy than necessarily a magician. And
I really love this detail. I mean, I imagine somebody
intercepting a letter and it looks like it's all about magic.
And to add to that, you know, there are these
weird symbols thrown in and it's from old John D.
Really there's important communications contained. I think that's such an
(16:24):
interesting tactic for a spy to take. I know, we
when we talked about Civil War spies, we talked about
one who would visit the hospitals and fame being crazy
and this is this reminded me of that. Almost just
a personality disguise. Almost yeah, something that has the ability
to tarnish your reputation, but as further in at the
(16:45):
same time dismiss what you're what you're working on. So
D did also employ his psychic abilities and occult knowledge
in this. Walsingham, for example, asked him to cast horoscopes
to evaluate the queen's marriage options, and he used this
to determine that neither the Duke Gianjou or his brother
were suitable marriage partners for the queen, So what other
(17:05):
intelligence to d obtain? Well, for one thing, he gathered
a lot of information about Spain, which was England's big
expansionist rival. He found out about the Armada, the Spanish
fleet that was designed to overthrow Elizabeth, long before it
was launched, and in fact, it said that D predicted
violent storms in eight He used his math and astronomy
(17:27):
knowledge to predict the weather, I guess, and spread that
around and Spain had some trouble because of that, because
of those rumors, they had trouble drumming up volunteers for
this venture. And then of course the predictions proved to
be true. Story did destroy many of the Armadas ships.
And some have wondered if that prediction that he made
was actually just psychological warfare by the English, or if
(17:49):
it was actually just that he knew it was really psychic.
But between those scientific pursuits and the spying, you think
that d would really have his work cut out for him.
But he also had some side jobs going on. He
(18:11):
told fortunes for money. He practiced necromancy with real corpses.
Basically attempting to communicate with the dead or even raise
the dead. And on top of that, he would also
teach the occult arts and alchemy to students for a fee,
basically as a magician for hire. But one other thing
(18:31):
that was a real passion of deeds was his efforts
to communicate with angels. I mean, this guy has so
much going on, but that was a really strong interest
of his. He said to have conducted occult experiments with
crystal gazing that he called scrying the ether and began
conversing with angelic intelligences this way, and d got more
(18:56):
and more involved in this. So while some of these
pursuits seemed pretty well balanced from most of his life,
this started to take over the other ones from the
fifteen eighties onward until it really began to dominate his
life almost entirely. And a lot of people think that
he changed his focus because he was just so frustrated
that he couldn't gain a comprehensive understanding of the universe.
(19:19):
Up until that point. That was what he was striving
for all along, as we mentioned earlier, to try to
reconcile the magical aspects of life with the practical aspects
and the secrets of the universe make it all makes sense,
and he was frustrated he couldn't do this despite his
long hours, despite his intelligence, and thought that maybe the
(19:41):
angels could explain it all it could help him out.
Another major influence that played a part in this, though,
was a man named Edward Kelly, not to be confused
with Ned Kelly another not Ned It's not another Australian podcast,
But Edward Kelly came to D's life in fifteen eighty
two and he's often referred to as D's and medium.
Acording to Encyclopedia Britannica, Kelly was a convicted counterfeiter and
(20:04):
he claimed that he could contact angels and spirits by
gazing into a crystal ball. He and D held seances together,
and D became pretty convinced that Kelly's abilities were actually real.
The two traveled on the continent together for several years
in the fifteen eighties, doing displays of magic at various courts,
and they recorded a language for communicating with angels, which
(20:25):
is now referred to as a Nokian, and he basically
claimed that the angels had revealed this language to them.
Many historians suggest that Kelly was pretty much a con artist,
doing this for fame and for wealth. According to d
biographer Wooley, he eventually made a play Ford's wife and
that's what sort of broke them apart. But D seems
(20:45):
to have really been sincere in his belief of the stuff,
and that didn't help him win any friends, and by
the time he returned to England in fifteen eighty nine,
his reputation had been very much tarnished by his involvement
in the accall Alton. He found that his library had
been ransacked and his books and scientific instruments had been stolen,
(21:06):
and that that great reputation as a practical mind, as
somebody who was intelligent and and capable of performing all
these sciences, was really gone. And ultimately the financial support
that D had longed for from Queen Elizabeth the First
and that she had sort of promised him to never
really materialized. She did give him a job, she appointed
(21:28):
him Warden of Manchester College in fift but that didn't
pay enough to support D and support his family, and
was honestly probably just a way to get him out
of London um away from from giving her a bad
rap by association. So his friends managed to raise some
money for him, but still his final years were pretty
(21:48):
much spent in poverty. He was miserable in Manchester, and
in sixteen oh five, to add insult to injury, the
area was hit by plague, killing his wife and several
of his children too. He of actually returned to London
and died there in December. He basically spent the end
of his life trying to fight off the reputation of
being a conjuror, and that's what many remember him as,
(22:11):
even though he did so many other things. They're kind
of faded into the background now. The British Museum, though,
has some artifacts associated with him that you can check out,
including a mirror that he probably used in his occult research.
And for all of the literary minded people out there,
d is also thought to be Some people actually say
he's almost certainly the inspiration for a very famous literary
(22:34):
conjur Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest. So in a lot
of ways, and some people have said this before, he
was the quintessential magician and therefore I think it's okay
submission for Halloween months, even though he wasn't that scarier,
spooky Thank you so much for joining us on the Saturday.
(23:00):
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you are l or something similar over the course of
today's episode, since it is from the archive that might
be out of date. Now, you can email us at
history podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and you
can find us all over social media at missed in
History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
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(23:23):
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favorite shows.
Happy Saturday, everybody. We have an episode coming up in
the near future that's related to alchemy, so we've pulled
a couple of related classics out of the archive to
wet everyone's appetites. Today's is about John d who was
an advisor to Queen Elizabeth the First, possibly also her spy,
and somebody that is requested from listeners from time to time.
(00:23):
He is more often remembered not for being a spy
or an advisor, but for being maybe kind of an
alchemist sorcerer. So in this episode, Sarah and Deblina got
into why that is. This originally came out in October
as one of their Halloween episodes, so enjoy. Welcome to
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I
(00:45):
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Deblina Choco Boarding and I'm fair doubting, and we
promised our listeners some speaking kind of halloweenish episodes in October,
and it just so happens that I've gotten magic on
the brain recently because I was visiting with my ten
(01:08):
year old niece and she is finally requiring me to
do something that many people have done, which is read
Harry Potter. Oh, finally, I know. I know you've been
wanting that for a long time. Yes, been my long
cherished hope. She in bed and I read Harry hopefain
that I'll read it. She's wearing a wizard outfit right now. Actually,
(01:30):
So we wanted to look into some real life examples
of people who were said to have been involved with
magic and the occult. And John D, who was a
mathematician and astronomer from the sixteenth century, really piqued our interest,
not least of all because there's a new opera about him.
So this opera, which is called Dr D, premiered at
the Manchester International Festival in July, and it came about
(01:52):
when festival organizers approached the graphic novelist Alan Moore, who
is the creator of V for Vendetta and From Hell,
approached him to work on a new project about the
quote life of an obscure but important figure from English history. So,
more pondering on this, decided to focus on John D.
(02:14):
Of course, Moore didn't finish the project. He left before
it was completed. But Damon Albarn, singer and songwriter of
the band Blur and also guerrillas. He did finish it
along with director Rufus Norris, and we haven't heard or
seen it ourselves, but we've we did get kind of
stuck on that phrase obscure but important figure from English history.
(02:34):
I mean, that's exactly the type of person we love
to restuff. He missed in history class exactly, so there's
no denying that D was important. In addition to being
an accomplished mathematician, astronomer, geographer and navigator and also book collector,
he was an adviser to Queen Elizabeth the First and
probably a spy for her in some capacity, and also
(02:54):
an early proponent of expanding Britain into an empire. So
why is this guy with some legitimate resume entrees sometimes
dismissed as the queen's astrologer and necromancer and a sorcerer.
Well we're going to take a look at that, but
first we need to find out how he got to
work for the queen in the first place. So it
started with schooling and he was born. John D was
(03:16):
born July fifty seven in London. His father, Roland, was
of Welsh descent and was probably some kind of merchant.
So John D started his studies at a school in
Chelmsford in Essex in fifteen thirty five, and then went
on to St John's College in Cambridge in fifteen forty two,
(03:37):
where he studied a pretty impressive lineup of Greek, Latin philosophy, geometry,
arithmetic and astronomy. And from the beginning he was really
dedicated to his studies, especially when you consider how young
he was at the time. He really seemed to love
to learn, especially when it came to studying mathematics. And
(03:57):
just to give you an example of young on Dye's
typical day. According to his biographer Benjamin Woolley, d would
work at his studies about eighteen hours a day, leaving
just four hours for sleep and two hours for meals.
So a busy child, and by all accounts he was
an extremely talented scholar. Some even call him a genius.
(04:19):
So I guess all that hard work of has really
paid off. He got both his bachelor's and master's degrees
from St John's in fifteen forty five and fifteen forty
eight respectively. In fifteen forty six he was made one
of the founding fellows of Trinity College in Cambridge, but
then he switched stuff up a little bit. He left
England from fifteen forty eight to fifteen fifty one. He
continued his scientific education on the continent, and he studied
(04:42):
with a variety of top experts and a number of
different fields, including cartography and mathematics. He published astronomy texts
and lectured on Euclid's elements. Euclid, of course, was a
Greek mathematician and sometimes called the father of geometry and
d is sometimes credited with popularizing Euclidean geometry and academic circles.
He was also said to be an early supporter of
(05:04):
Copernicus's heliocentric model of the universe. So he was out
promoting sort of revolutionary He was out learning and kind
of yeah, thinking about and talking about cutting edge ideas.
It was interesting, though he turned down to mathematical professorships,
one at the University of Paris in fifteen fifty one
(05:25):
and another one that was offered to him at the
University of Oxford in fifteen fifty four. It's unclear exactly
why he did this. He seems to have had designs
on landing a position with the English crown, though as
we'll see later, probably hoped that that setup would result
in financial support or patronage that would allow him to
pursue his own research, so that seemed to work at first.
(05:46):
He was aiming higher. Yeah, it did seem to work
at first, And when d returned to England in fifteen
fifty one, he was able to associate himself at the
Royal court and he offered his math instruction to courtiers
and to navig gators, and that same year he was
presented to King Edward the six who granted him a
pension of one hundred crowns, which D later exchange for rectorship,
(06:11):
which had a nice comfortable living associated with it. Um,
So yeah, it seems like he was doing well for himself.
He made friends at court, he received the patronage of
a couple of them, including the Duchess of Northumberland, and
soon he started to get caught up in things though,
the intrigue that was going on at the time regarding
Queen Mary's ascension to the throne and the tensions going
(06:32):
on in England between the Catholics and the Protestants. But
Deep played his cards right, and at least at first
he didn't appear to take sides, which obviously during this
time could mean a swift execution. Yeah. So when Queen
Mary the First, who was Catholic, took the throne, de
served as a consultant and astrologer to her. So we
(06:53):
should stop here, though and talk about it a little bit,
because you're probably thinking, whoa wait a second, astrology. I
thought you said D was into astronomy. I have a
whole different opinion of him now. But before you go
judging him, we have to give you a little background
by way of explanation. Around this time, there wasn't such
a distinct line between astronomy and astrology. Many people like
(07:14):
D put stock in both. In fact, even though people
were coming out of the Dark Ages in the sixteenth century,
reason and science still existed right alongside superstition and magic.
So he wasn't the only one to feel this way
or to have these beliefs. And they'll get too upset
about Dark Ages people. I know everyone sometimes gets riled
(07:35):
up with that, but I think it's a good illustrative
term for discussing coming out of this real superstitious, magical time. Yeah,
it's illustrative. So just to give you an example of
what D's beliefs were like, he believed that the positions
of the planets at the moment of a person's birth
would affect their future, so like astrology, but he was
(07:57):
driven to find scientific explanation for this, and it was
this need to understand it all that really shaped his
whole career. So we're gonna two essentially, and so he
was asked to use these astrology skills for Queen Mary.
He was asked to cast horoscopes for her and for
her husband, Philip the second of Spain. Around that time, though,
(08:18):
D also started a correspondence with the Protestant Princess Elizabeth,
Mary's half sister, and he did an astrological chart for
her too. Soon after this, maybe coincidentally, maybe not. In
May a, fifteen fifty five, D was arrested and imprisoned
at Hampton Court, a week or so before Elizabeth faced
a similar similar situation, and the charge against him may
(08:41):
be different depending on what source you look at. I've
seen it as conjuring, and then I've seen it in
other places as simply calculating just to explain that, and
mathematics was kind of considered a form of black magic
by some at that time, so that's why calculating would
have been a criminal charge. He was acquitted after this
and released soon after though, and he went back to
work for Mary, which kind of amazes me. Yeah, he
(09:03):
kept on working for Mary, and he was loyal to
her until she died in fifty eight, and then when
Elizabeth the First became queen after that, d immediately shifted
his allegiance to her. It's likely most people think that
he may have supported her all along, but regardless, it's
interesting to see that he showed loyalty to kind of
(09:23):
whoever was in power because it was best for him,
especially since it seems like it would be difficult for
an astrologer to show loyalty to two people. What are
you going to tell somebody that there their cards don't
look so great or their stars aren't aligned. Maybe just
avoid the conversation. It would be a it would be
a tricky conversation to have. So with Elizabeth, he became
(09:52):
kind of a scientific and medical advisor to her, known
officially as the Queen's Intelligencer or the Royal Astrologer, and
she him to use his astrological skills to pick the
data for coordination, and obviously it worked out, so she
was happy with the result and She promised him security,
but always kind of kept him at arm's length, like
she didn't want to be too closely associated with his
(10:15):
involvement in the occult. But de still had that dream
of royal patronage, and especially a dream of creating this
huge royal library that would be available to everyone with
the goal of advancing learning. But he couldn't get official
support for that, so finally he just decided to build
his own private library and spent several years abroad collecting
(10:37):
books for it. By the mid fifteen sixties he had
set up a laboratory and a library near London, and
the library had more than four thousand books in it
and was the largest private library in England at the time.
But d kept to his original intention. He was really
generous with it. He made it accessible to scholars. He
had a pretty significant collection of astronomic cole instruments, a
(11:01):
collection of globes, so this was all suddenly um at
the fingertips of England scholars, which was a great boon
for them and for him too. During the next twenty
years or so, D was involved in a number of
let's say practical or more scientific compared yes. He edited,
for example, the first English translation of Euclid's Elements in
(11:24):
fifteen seventy. He also observed Tico Brahe's Supernova fifteen seventy two,
and if you would like to know a little bit
more about that, you can reference art Tico Brahy podcast
from last December. So he observed this as well, and
he offered some trigger a metric methods for fighting its
distance from Earth. So he kind of helped to the
(11:44):
discussion absolutely, and he recommended that England adopt the Gregorian
calendar in eighty two, although no one really listened to
him at the time. And during this entire period he
was also helping lay the groundwork for English exploration by
preparing just also sorts of nautical information, including maps and
charts for navigation in the polar regions, as well as
(12:05):
teaching ship captains and crews about the principles of navigation
and giving them navigational instruments. So this allowed them to
venture out on routes that were away from the coast
and really encouraged exploration. I kind of see him as
a coach almost to all of these advisors. You know,
somebody who's got the brains and knows all of the
(12:26):
specifics for all of these diverse sciences and can help
the people actually making the decisions make the correct decision.
And just a little side note if you're interested in
such things. Uh D was probably an advisor on Sir
Francis Drake's voyages as well, so that's another impressive entry
for his resume. But along those same lines, D was
(12:46):
a really big advocate of building a British empire, and
that sort of makes sense if you consider his involvement
in all the navigation stuff. He expressed those views, those
views for an empire in a work called Perfect of Navigation.
But just because he was working on navigation and empire
building didn't mean that he had left math and physics
(13:08):
and astrology and magic um to just linger there and
not be worked on. He published something called the Propa
Dumata Afrostica in fiftifty eight, which contained his views on
those subjects math and physics and magic and things like that,
and that's not all he had going on. Many sources
also suggest that throughout this period D was working with
(13:31):
none other than Sir Francis Walsingham as a spy for
the English crown, and uh that's kind of it's kind
of a surprise, isn't it It is, It just takes
the story in a completely different direction. An article in
Military History by Adam Mandelbaum, for example, suggests that it
was D, along with Walsingham, who founded the British Secret
(13:55):
Intelligence Service. I mean, talk about having an entry on
your resume. That's somethinging that you wouldn't expect for someone
who's labeled a sorcerer and a conjuror not at all.
But he was probably able to use both his scientific
and his more supernatural skills to act as a spy
and to work in this capacity because for the more
(14:16):
scientific part of things. Mondel Bomb suggests that D was
kind of like a sixteenth century version of James Bond
gadget master Q. He would create all kinds of cool devices,
including this mechanical flying bird, which might not have been
used for spying, but it still sounds pretty neat. Um.
So you know that that very practical side of him
(14:36):
had an outlet in this. Speaking of James Bond, there
is another James Bond connection here that's kind of interesting,
and I couldn't really find it in any great academic
sources or anything, so I thought I'd just put it
out there that if you happen to look up D
and double oh seven on the Internet, you might find
some interesting stuff there. Some say that he actually used
(14:59):
that double oh seven sign and his secret correspondence to
the Queen. The two ohs would symbolize his eyes and
the seven was just a sacred or lucky number to him.
I like that. Maybe some tutor experts can let us
know if there's any truth behind that. Here's what we
do know, though. D also discovered this work while he
(15:20):
was searching for books abroad, and it was the Staganigraphia
of Johannas Trauthemius, a German abbott and magician of the
late fifteenth century. It was divided into three books, all
of which were apparently concerned with the evocation of angels,
and this was a topic that D was very interested in.
We'll tell you more about that later. But the first
(15:40):
two parts actually turned out to be hoaxes. They were
really the subject of them was really secret codes, and
only the third part was actually about contacting spirits. So,
according to mondel Baouma's article, D used this code to
communicate with Walsingham and disguise the intelligence he'd gathered throwing
some symbols associated with alchemy in there too. That was
(16:01):
in the mix so that people would think that they
were magical writings. It's why some people think of him
more as a master spy than necessarily a magician. And
I really love this detail. I mean, I imagine somebody
intercepting a letter and it looks like it's all about magic.
And to add to that, you know, there are these
weird symbols thrown in and it's from old John D.
Really there's important communications contained. I think that's such an
(16:24):
interesting tactic for a spy to take. I know, we
when we talked about Civil War spies, we talked about
one who would visit the hospitals and fame being crazy
and this is this reminded me of that. Almost just
a personality disguise. Almost yeah, something that has the ability
to tarnish your reputation, but as further in at the
(16:45):
same time dismiss what you're what you're working on. So
D did also employ his psychic abilities and occult knowledge
in this. Walsingham, for example, asked him to cast horoscopes
to evaluate the queen's marriage options, and he used this
to determine that neither the Duke Gianjou or his brother
were suitable marriage partners for the queen, So what other
(17:05):
intelligence to d obtain? Well, for one thing, he gathered
a lot of information about Spain, which was England's big
expansionist rival. He found out about the Armada, the Spanish
fleet that was designed to overthrow Elizabeth, long before it
was launched, and in fact, it said that D predicted
violent storms in eight He used his math and astronomy
(17:27):
knowledge to predict the weather, I guess, and spread that
around and Spain had some trouble because of that, because
of those rumors, they had trouble drumming up volunteers for
this venture. And then of course the predictions proved to
be true. Story did destroy many of the Armadas ships.
And some have wondered if that prediction that he made
was actually just psychological warfare by the English, or if
(17:49):
it was actually just that he knew it was really psychic.
But between those scientific pursuits and the spying, you think
that d would really have his work cut out for him.
But he also had some side jobs going on. He
(18:11):
told fortunes for money. He practiced necromancy with real corpses.
Basically attempting to communicate with the dead or even raise
the dead. And on top of that, he would also
teach the occult arts and alchemy to students for a fee,
basically as a magician for hire. But one other thing
(18:31):
that was a real passion of deeds was his efforts
to communicate with angels. I mean, this guy has so
much going on, but that was a really strong interest
of his. He said to have conducted occult experiments with
crystal gazing that he called scrying the ether and began
conversing with angelic intelligences this way, and d got more
(18:56):
and more involved in this. So while some of these
pursuits seemed pretty well balanced from most of his life,
this started to take over the other ones from the
fifteen eighties onward until it really began to dominate his
life almost entirely. And a lot of people think that
he changed his focus because he was just so frustrated
that he couldn't gain a comprehensive understanding of the universe.
(19:19):
Up until that point. That was what he was striving
for all along, as we mentioned earlier, to try to
reconcile the magical aspects of life with the practical aspects
and the secrets of the universe make it all makes sense,
and he was frustrated he couldn't do this despite his
long hours, despite his intelligence, and thought that maybe the
(19:41):
angels could explain it all it could help him out.
Another major influence that played a part in this, though,
was a man named Edward Kelly, not to be confused
with Ned Kelly another not Ned It's not another Australian podcast,
But Edward Kelly came to D's life in fifteen eighty
two and he's often referred to as D's and medium.
Acording to Encyclopedia Britannica, Kelly was a convicted counterfeiter and
(20:04):
he claimed that he could contact angels and spirits by
gazing into a crystal ball. He and D held seances together,
and D became pretty convinced that Kelly's abilities were actually real.
The two traveled on the continent together for several years
in the fifteen eighties, doing displays of magic at various courts,
and they recorded a language for communicating with angels, which
(20:25):
is now referred to as a Nokian, and he basically
claimed that the angels had revealed this language to them.
Many historians suggest that Kelly was pretty much a con artist,
doing this for fame and for wealth. According to d
biographer Wooley, he eventually made a play Ford's wife and
that's what sort of broke them apart. But D seems
(20:45):
to have really been sincere in his belief of the stuff,
and that didn't help him win any friends, and by
the time he returned to England in fifteen eighty nine,
his reputation had been very much tarnished by his involvement
in the accall Alton. He found that his library had
been ransacked and his books and scientific instruments had been stolen,
(21:06):
and that that great reputation as a practical mind, as
somebody who was intelligent and and capable of performing all
these sciences, was really gone. And ultimately the financial support
that D had longed for from Queen Elizabeth the First
and that she had sort of promised him to never
really materialized. She did give him a job, she appointed
(21:28):
him Warden of Manchester College in fift but that didn't
pay enough to support D and support his family, and
was honestly probably just a way to get him out
of London um away from from giving her a bad
rap by association. So his friends managed to raise some
money for him, but still his final years were pretty
(21:48):
much spent in poverty. He was miserable in Manchester, and
in sixteen oh five, to add insult to injury, the
area was hit by plague, killing his wife and several
of his children too. He of actually returned to London
and died there in December. He basically spent the end
of his life trying to fight off the reputation of
being a conjuror, and that's what many remember him as,
(22:11):
even though he did so many other things. They're kind
of faded into the background now. The British Museum, though,
has some artifacts associated with him that you can check out,
including a mirror that he probably used in his occult research.
And for all of the literary minded people out there,
d is also thought to be Some people actually say
he's almost certainly the inspiration for a very famous literary
(22:34):
conjur Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest. So in a lot
of ways, and some people have said this before, he
was the quintessential magician and therefore I think it's okay
submission for Halloween months, even though he wasn't that scarier,
spooky Thank you so much for joining us on the Saturday.
(23:00):
If you have heard an email address or a Facebook
you are l or something similar over the course of
today's episode, since it is from the archive that might
be out of date. Now, you can email us at
history podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and you
can find us all over social media at missed in
History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
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