Xognosis EsotericaArcane Publishing StudioOn the evening of 3 May 1591, at an inn in the little town of Sobeslav south of Tabor, a tired Englishman lay down for an after-dinner sleep. He had ridden six Dutch miles toward Lord Rosenberg's lands and, as the English intelligencer Thomas Webbe reported, was "without suspect".
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On the evening of 3 May 1591, at an inn in the little town of Sobeslav south of Tabor, a tired Englishman lay down for an after-dinner sleep. He had ridden six Dutch miles toward Lord Rosenberg's lands and, as the English intelligencer Thomas Webbe reported, was "without suspect". The Emperor's guards entered, took him, "entreated him very ill", cut his doublet open with a knife, and told him they were commanded to carry him back "dead or alive, which they cared not". The sleeper was Edward Kelley, once Dr. John Dee's scryer, now imperial alchemist, and the fall that began that afternoon at Sobeslav did not end until the weeks after Christmas 1597, at a castle in Most, with a broken body and a cup of water.
The partnership with Dee had broken apart in early 1589. Dee's household left Trebon in March of that year, and Dee never saw his former medium again. What followed for Kelley was an ascent so steep it reads like satire. By 22 August 1589 Dee could tell Walsingham that his "great friend" was "now in most favourable manner created a Baron of the Kingdom of Boemia". Charlotte Fell Smith, whose biography of Dee remains standard, explains what the dignity actually was: "The actual title conferred was eques auratus", a knight whose armour was gilded, "in English it was of course 'Sir'". The royal patent followed on 23 February 1590, naming him a "Golden Knight" of the Bohemian Kingdom. Kelley, whose ears had been cropped at Lancaster years before he ever met Dee, now signed himself with a claimed descent from a noble house while Rosenberg showered him with property: the Liběřice castle, a farm, and nine villages, as the regional Czech encyclopedia records. The inflation had already begun with Dee's own letter. The patent supports "Golden Knight" and nothing higher.
Rudolf II had not knighted Kelley for his conversation. He wanted the transmutation, and when Kelley could not or would not deliver, the friendship curdled into a manhunt and then a fine. On 30 April 1591 an armed party raided Kelley's house in Prague's Na Slovanech district; he had fled overnight, leaving his brother Thomas in chains. The royal edict of 2 May 1591, as Charles Nicholl's archival reconstruction in the London Review of Books establishes, indicted him as a criminal and a fugitive. Count Rosenberg's own secretary, Václav Březan, entered the hunt in the Rozmberk annals: "Eduardus Kelleus, the cheating alchemist, escaped from Prague, was pursued by His Majesty's soldiers, and arrested at Sobeslav."
Kelley was delivered to Křivoklát castle and shut in the Huderka Tower. The Fugger agency newsletters, the wire service of their day, tracked his condition through the spring. On 8 May 1591: "He was not even allowed a bread knife: everything was taken away." On 15 May he seemed "in the depths of despair" and refused food, so that it was feared he might die. By 2 July he was held "with no air but that which comes through a hole, through which he can reach for his food bit by bit". In February 1592 the Emperor's secretary sent the castle governor six questions to put to the prisoner, beginning with how the four pounds of tincture found at his house could be used in projections and ending with the meaning of the secret characters in his notebooks. Bolton's 1904 study states flatly that Kelley "was put to torture" while questioned; the torture claim rests on Bolton and should be weighed accordingly.
Release came in October 1593. Abraham Faulkon, who soon dined with him, reported the delivery "the 16th day of October, new style"; Dee heard by 5 December that it had come on 4 October, two and a half years after the arrest. Freedom restored nothing. Barred from court, Kelley lived on credit, borrowing from a Prague brewer and leaving a tailor's bill unpaid. In August 1595 Dee recorded in his private diary that he had received "Sir Edward Kellyes letters of the Emperor's, inviting me to his servyce again". That November came another entry: "the newes that Sir Edward Kelley was slayne". The report was false. Legends of his death had begun before he was dead.
In October 1596, a prisoner at Most Castle dedicated a Latin treatise on the philosophers' stone to Rudolf II, the man who kept him there. "Though I have now twice suffered chains and imprisonment in Bohemia, an indignity which has been offered to me nowhere else in the world", Kelley wrote, "yet my mind remaining unbound, has all the time exercised itself in the study of that philosophy which is despised only by the wicked and foolish." The letter closes with a line of cold dignity: "it always was and always will be the way of mankind to release Barabbas and crucify Christ: this I have (for my good, no doubt) experienced in my own case." The second arrest had come in late 1596, most likely over debt, though a tradition of a duel with a man named Hunkler also survives, named in verses by Rudolf's court poet Mardocheus de Delle and standard in Czech telling. Nicholl's reconstruction of the arrest record does not confirm the duel; it is an unproven tradition that may preserve a real quarrel.
The castle-keeper's expense account at Most, running from 7 November 1596, itemizes firewood, food, a servant, and a four-man guard. At Christmas 1597, according to a near-contemporary Bohemian manuscript by Simon Tadeáš Budeck, translated into English for the first time by Nicholl, Kelley "climbed down from his prison" toward a cart where his brother waited, "fell into the moat, and broke his other leg in three places". Taken back inside, he asked that his wife and daughter be allowed to visit, spoke English to the one and Flemish and Latin to the other, "asked to be given some water; and then he drank the water, and died."
That a fall during an escape, a shattered leg, and death in custody within weeks is the real shape of the ending is as secure as this period allows: Budeck, Delle's verses, John Weever's 1631 account, and Arthur Dee's recollections all independently agree on it. Everything else is accretion.
No early source describes a deliberate leap from a tower. Budeck says he climbed down and fell; Weever, whose account is the earliest printed English version, has him "clammering over a Wall in his own House in Prague" and falling "down from the Battlements"; Arthur Dee says he fell descending the wall after helpers sent from England had drugged his keepers "giving opium in drink". Fell Smith printed the turret-window version in 1909 but conceded it "has hardly been tracked home to its source". The famous leap is a later compression of all these into one dramatic image. The same is true of the rope-snap and amputation local legend assigns to Křivoklát, which Nicholl dismisses flatly: "there is no evidence at all that it happened at Krivoklat". The cup of water has been read as suicide, most insistently by modern retellings, local and tourist, that assemble every variant, both broken legs, the poison, a death date of 1 November 1597, into a single plot. The date is an inference from the expense account's end; the poison is interpretation; the day of his death is simply not recorded.
The documents give us a knighted prisoner who fell while escaping and died in captivity. The tower leap, the rope, and the poison are what legend added, beginning within a decade of his death and still accumulating now.
One link in that chain of legend is the book this site republishes. When Meric Casaubon printed the Dee diaries in 1659, his Postscript reported that Kelley "was put in Prison by the Emperor, for a notable Chymical cheat", and reprinted Weever's wall-fall as the ending. Readers of A True and Faithful Relation, Volume III should know what the volume itself shows: the diaries close a decade after the parting with Dee old and poor at Mortlake, while Kelley's whole afterlife, the title, the towers, the fall, happened offstage, in documents the angels never mentioned.
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