Dee

Dee, DR JOHN, alchemist, was born in London, 13th July 1527, and educated there and at Chelmsford, till in 1542 he was sent to St John's College, Cambridge, where for three years he studied eighteen hours a day. One of the original fellows of Trinity (1546), he earned the reputation of a sorcerer by his mechanical beetle in a representation of Aristophanes' Peace, and next year he fetched from the Low Countries sundry astronomical instruments. This was the first of many foreign visits—to Louvain and Paris (1548-51), where he lectured on Euclid, to Venice and Presburg in Hungary (1563), to Lorraine (1571), to Frankfort-on-Oder (1578), to Bohemia (1583-89), and even, it is said, to St Helena. He was imprisoned under Queen Mary on suspicion of compassing her death by magic (1555); but Edward VI. had conferred two church livings on him, and Elizabeth showed him considerable favour, twice visiting him at his Mortlake home, and in 1595 making him warden of Manchester College. He was constantly in difficulties, though he claimed to have found in the ruins of Glastonbury a quantity of the Elixir, one grain of which transmuted into gold a piece of a warming-pan. Indeed, he appears to have been as much dupe as deceiver, the dupe of his own assistant, Edward Kelly, during 1582-89. This knave, who had lost both ears in the pillory, professed to confer with angels by means of Dee's magic crystal (see CRYSTALLOMACY), and talked him into consenting to a community of wives. In 1604 Dee petitioned James I. to let him clear himself by public trial of the slander that he was a 'caller of divels,' but half a year later he was back at his invocations. He died wretchedly poor, in December 1608, and was buried in Mortlake church. 'A mighty good man he was,' by Aubrey's showing, 'a great peace-maker, a very handsome man, with fair, clear, sanguine complexion, and a long beard as white as milke.' His eldest son, Arthur (1579-1651), was likewise an alchemist, a friend of Sir Thomas Browne. Of Dr Dee's seventy-nine works, only thirteen have ever been printed: the rest are in MS. at Oxford, Cambridge, and the British Museum. They deal with logic, mathematics, astrology, alchemy, navigation, geography, the 'Rosie Crucian Secrets,' and the reformation of the calendar (1583), in which at least he was much in advance of his countrymen. See his Private Diary, edited by J. O. Halliwell (Halliwell-Phillipps) for the Camden Society (1842), and a thirteen-page article in Cooper's Athenæ Cantabrigienses (vol. ii. 1861).