3


To Dee's single-hearted nature such success was magnificent, wonderful. He began forthwith to treat his quondam skryer with added respect; the expression "Dominus Kelly" creeps once into the diary; and Kelly grew arrogant and overbearing. For the moment, however, he is all for friendship and respect.

"Prage. 1587. 25 Januarii." [This in Dee's hand.] (addressed) "To the Right Worshipful and his assured friend Mr. John Dee Esquire, give these. Magnifico Domino, Domino Dee.

"Sir. My hearty commendations unto you, desiring your health as my own; my Lord was exceeding glad of your Letters, and said, `Now I see he loveth me,' and truly as far as I perceive he loveth us heartily. This Sunday in the Name of the Blessed Trinity I begin my journey [to Poland], wherein I commend me unto your prayers, desiring the Almighty to send his fortitude with me. I commend me unto Mrs. Dee a thousand times, and unto your little babes: wishing myself rather amongst you than elsewhere. I will by God's grace about twenty days hence return in the mean season all comfort and joy be amongst you.

"Your assured and immoveable friend

"E. Kelly."

When this letter reached Trebona, Dee had gone riding with two horsemen of the city of Neuhaus, hoping to meet Rosenberg, who he thought would return that way from Vienna to Prague. Mrs. Dee at once despatched the servant Ludovic to meet his master. So Dee received Kelly's affectionate letter "in the highway, without Platz," a village about half-way to Neuhaus. Ludovic carried also a little note from Jane to her husband. It is the only letter of hers we have, but it confirms all that we suspect. We know her to have been a well-educated, well-read woman; the writing is strong and clear; and did not Francis Pucci describe her as a learned woman, "lectissima femina"? She must also have been an extraordinarily capable one to have controlled and managed her large household of children, assistants, apprentices, servants and miscellaneous visitors, often in the absence of her husband, and in a foreign land, constantly moving on from place to place in this nomadic life they led. Dee has a charming name for her. Somewhere in a letter he speaks of "my payneful Jane." Full of pains she must indeed have been, the model wife for an elderly, incomprehensible husband, using her intellectual powers to accommodate her family, while the learned man purused his angelic visions and his alchemical experiments unhampered. Above all things she must have been a peacemaker, hot and hasty although she sometimes was. Here is the letter to the husband who had only left her that morning: -

"Swethart. I commend me unto you, hoping in God that you ar in good health as I, and my children, with all my household, am here, I prayse God for it. I have non other matter to write unto you at this time."

There is a capable and managing sound about "my" children and "my" household, which leads one to wonder what this practical housewife thought of all the angelic promises which were never kept or performed. At the outset of the mysterious Kelly doings she was, we know, in her impetuous way, annoyed, angry, probably contemptuous, but by this time she perhaps had grown either to believe in them or tolerantly to acquiesce. She was only thirty-two, yet she had lived through many strange experiences and was soon to be put to the strongest test possible to a woman.


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