Robert Parry
On this, the 3rd birthday of Robert Parry’s wonderful novel Virgin and the Crab, I am delighted to share with you a guest article about the protagonist of Parry’s novel – the fascinating John Dee.
We are also giving away a copy of Virgin and the Crab to one lucky commenter, so be sure to leave a comment after Robert’s post.
You can read my review of this remarkable book here.
Welcome Robert!
Thank you Natalie, for helping me celebrate the 3rd Birthday of my novel ‘Virgin and the Crab’ here on The Tudor Trail. The novel itself is set in the middle of the 16th century, within that brief, extraordinary period in English history when we had no less than two kings and three queens in rapid succession, all within a twelve-year period. The main protagonist through all of this, is the astronomer, alchemist and spy, John Dee (1527-1609) and I would like to write a little here about how his reputation has suffered, often unjustly, over the centuries. For those who do not know too much about him, you can find a brief biographical sketch here.
Virgin and the Crab
In my story, Dee is a young man on an heroic mission, and many of the more controversial accusations to be levelled against him by his enemies, of which he had quite a few, had yet to be fashioned. But fashioned they were. As a character, he has made various appearances in novels and screenplays over the centuries, but unfortunately usually in a less-than-flattering guise. Often he has a walk-on part as some deranged magician or as a fantastical, half-wizard half-prophet kind of figure full of dire predictions of impending doom.
It is remarkable how someone who, in his time, was regarded as the greatest of humanist scholars, a man in possession of a library more extensive than that of most universities and who was consulted by almost every major player in Elizabethan society from the Queen downwards on matters as diverse as geography, mathematics, geometry, navigation, astronomy and optics, should have been virtually airbrushed out of history. But this has happened – and only very recently has there been any serious attempt by historians to rescue his name from obscurity.
John Dee
He did, at least, get off to a good start as far as character portrayal goes. He was almost certainly the source for the wizard Prospero in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. He might also have provided more than a little inspiration for Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. He makes an appearance in Spenser’s Faerie Queen and, a little later, Ben Jonson probably incorporated a piece of him in his play The Alchemist. But from there it all seems to have gone downhill rather fast.
The damage was already beginning to take place, in fact, towards the end of his life, after the passing of Queen Elizabeth and the protection she had afforded him. The new regime under King James, with its witch hunts and its suspicion of anything redolent of demonic forces, could only view his inquiries into the world of the unseen as an embarrassment and a threat. The man who had once held the attention and ear of so many of the kings and queens of Europe, from London to Paris, from Moscow to Prague, began to lose status.
Later, during the 16th century, Dee’s posthumous reputation suffered a further blow due to the writings of a gentleman by the name of Meric Casaubon, a classical scholar who is said to have fallen foul of the government and church during the harsh Puritanical regime of Oliver Cromwell and who, for reasons perhaps best known to himself, resolved to argue against one of the fundamental principles of Protestant belief, namely that humans can receive guidance directly from divine sources, without intercession. Dee’s extensive records of angelic conversations were compiled in a volume by Casaubon as a means of demonstrating that such revelations could be evil and mischievous. Mud sticks, of course – and over subsequent generations, Casaubon’s character assassination of Dee in his lengthy introduction to his volume became ammunition for sceptics of the occult, and even of other, more sobre forms of spiritual enquiry.
By the Victorian era, Dee had been demoted to little more than a figure of ridicule. Any appearances he made in literature were often frivolous, trading merely on his vague associations with the world of magic and the occult and which could therefore always be trucked out to provide the occasional lurid touch for writers and dramatist in search of a ‘character.’ In our own times, Dee has occasionally fared a little better in fiction and on the screen, but not very often.
The fact is, John Dee, was a man who lived on the cusp between the old world and the new. That was what the 16th Century did – gradually changing its priorities from spiritual values to material ones. Astride these shifting sands, Dee was not only one of the most gifted of scientists at the forefront of the change, but he also remained a devout Christian and a dedicated and faithful servant of the Crown. The accusation, repeated still, that he died alone in abject poverty, the victim of a life of foolishness and ignorance is probably more than a little inaccurate, therefore. Hearsay statements to this effect made years after his death by those who did not know him – by the astrologer William Lilly, for example – are confused and cannot be relied upon as evidence. Lilly even refers to Dee’s education being at Oxford, when in fact it was at Cambridge. Yes, it is true that Dee’s diaries indicate that he sometimes borrowed money or sold books, but this is not necessarily a sign of poverty. In Tudor times, well-to-do people in large households would borrow to maintain cash flow – it was the ‘credit card’ of the times. The fact is, John Dee enjoyed the company and patronage of numerous wealthy and noble families until the end of his days. His son was a successful physician, and his daughter appears to have been devoted to him. He is even known to have cast horoscopes for his grandchildren.
Perhaps we need to look at Dee in a more tolerant light – not because he was a man who believed in angels, but rather because he was a man who asked whether there might be angels. And there is quite a difference between those two statements. In my novel I have tried to portray him as an intelligent and courageous being, a force for good and for progress – someone at the very centre of the intellectual and political universe of Tudor England. I wanted to do that because I believe that was what he was like.
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