QI The Book of the Dead

enchantment’ to subvert the queen herself. His main accuser was George Ferrers, once a rival stage-designer and no doubt jealous of Dee’s talent. Soon after Dee’s arrest, one of the Ferrers children dropped down dead and another was struck blind. This hardly helped Dr Dee’s reputation as a practitioner of the dark arts, but he defended himself eloquently and Edmund Bonner, Bishop ofLondon, cleared him of heresy. Dee was released and, eager to prove himself a scholar not a sorcerer, made a detailed proposal to the queen for establishing a national library, gathering together all the books and manuscripts scattered during her father’s dissolution of the monasteries. It was a bold and ambitious plan and would have turned England into the research powerhouse of Europe. Mary listened politely but declined.
    Meanwhile Dee’s father, Rowland, had lost his position at court and all his assets had been stripped, leaving his son without an inheritance. Dee returned to Europe where his services as an astrologer could be charged at a much higher premium than in England. At the same time, he discovered the works of the hermetic philosopher Cornelius Agrippa, which quickened his interest in alchemy. When Mary died in 1558, Queen Elizabeth offered him his old job back, though at a substantially lower rate of pay, which caused Dee great annoyance. He came back all the same, becoming one of her most trusted advisors, and even casting the horoscope to select the date for her coronation.
    Over the next decade Dee made many practical contributions to public life. He was the first person to apply geometry to navigation and trained many of the great navigators of the age both to read maps and to make them. He also prepared the intellectual and legal case for Britain’s expansion into the New World, coming up with justifications that stretched back into the mythical past, in particular the supposed discovery of North America by the Welsh Prince Madog in 1170. He was the first person to use the phrase ‘British Empire’, and the first to suggest a voyage to map the Northwest Passage that was believed to link the Atlantic and the Pacific. And he became a spy for the queen, going on secret missions to Europe and communicating bymeans of elaborate codes of his own devising. He signed his letters to her ‘007’. Dee was also summoned to the royal presence whenever something out of the ordinary occurred; on one occasion he was asked to comment on a wax effigy stuck with pig bristles that was found in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and on another he was asked to explain a ‘blazing star’ that had appeared in the sky. His job under these circumstances was always to come up with plausible explanations that reduced rather than encouraged superstitious speculation.
    We know very little of Dee’s personal life until 1577, when he started to keep a diary. It is one of the many paradoxes running through Dee’s life that the very scrupulousness that made him such a good scientist also furnished the evidence that was to damn his reputation. The diary is meticulous. From it we know that he was married for the second or (possibly) third time in 1578, to Jane Fromonds, a lady-in-waiting at Elizabeth’s court. He was fifty-one and she was twenty-three and she bore him eight children. The couple seem to have been devoted, in Dee’s case almost to the point of mania. The diary contains detailed, cryptic records of her periods, carefully logging not only when they occurred but also how heavy they were, whether the ‘show’ was ‘small’ or ‘abundant’. He also noted down when they had sex, giving not just the date, but also the time. But much more damaging is the revelation in the diary of Dee’s developing fixation with ‘angelic communication’.
    In 1578 Dee’s beloved mother died, bequeathing him her house in Mortlake. He was an only child and they had lived under the same roof for most of his life. Perhaps as a result of this loss, and inspired by a sequence of strange and powerful dreams, he became entranced by the ethereal otherworld. Using his‘scrying’ mirror of polished black obsidian, rumoured to be an Aztec treasure stolen by the Conquistador Hernán Cortés himself, he attempted to make contact with the spirits. Nothing materialised. ‘I know I can not see, nor scry,’ he confessed to his diary. A crystal he had tracked down from a collector of curiosities in Glastonbury seemed to provide tantalising glimpses, but he