The Queen's Astrologer: The Price of Prophecy (Part 1)

0:15 Pushkin. June fifteen fifty five, Hampton Court, near London. Inside this labyrinthine, red brick palace, a man called John D paces around his chamber. It's quiet and claustrophobic. Sunlight slips through small leaded windows, casting shadows on flagstone floors. Outside. Guards flank the chamber door. John D isn't being held in a dank, rat infested dungeon. There are no chains in sight. But make no mistake, John D is a prisoner.

1:05 Hampton Court Palace hums with anxious call. Queen Mary has announced that she's expecting an air, so she too is confined to her chambers. Her advisors are watching John D closely. They believe that he's a dangerous man, that he poses the utmost threat to his queen. Perhaps he does, But John D isn't an assassin or the leader of an open rebellion. He's a mathematician. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. Before he was a prisoner, John D was a prodigy. He was born in London in fifteen twenty seven, where his father was a wealthy cloth merchant and courtier. Rowland D. Gave his son the best education that money could buy, and at school the boy's appetite for learning was voracious. On occasion, young John accompanied

2:35 his father to the glittering royal palaces, where he glimpsed riches from across the globe, tapestries, carpets, mirrors, clocks. He saw intricate maps at Court of Rome, of Jerusalem of the known world and its entirety, and he mingled with diplomats, astrologers and navigators. As he grew older, he came to understand that there was a world far beyond London's narrow streets, and it brimmed with mystery. At fifteen, d entered the University of Cambridge. Here he slept for just four hours a night, avidly filling his days with Greek, Latin, scripture, law and cryptography. He studied astronomy, tracing the movements of the planets and stars across vellum charts. The symbolic interpretation of those planets and stars. Astrology was on the curriculum too.

3:44 It was widely accepted that the heavens influenced earthly affairs, and astrology and astronomy were considered to be of equal importance. Two halves of a whole. At Cambridge, D also tried his hand at engineering, building an enormous dung beetle for production of aristophanes piece midplay. The beetle leapt into the air, as D recalled.

4:19 A great wondering, and many vain reports spread abroad of the means how that was affected.

4:27 The audience was shocked, convinced that this was some sort of demonic magic. In fact, it was a triumph of mechanics. D's calling wasn't sorcery, it was mathematics. In Tudor, England, maths was a deeply suspect discipline, seen as a slippery slope to the dark arts. Pythagoras himself was believed in some quarters to have been a magician, and the Tudor authorities had burned many mathematical texts, condemning them as conjuring books.

5:07 But D paid the these critics little mind. He regarded maths as practical. Geometry and trigonometry were essential to fields such as navigation and astrology. What's more, calculation and ratio revealed the hidden architecture of nature, suggesting that the universe wasn't chaotic and unpredictable. With the power of numbers, it could be ordered and understood. D was determined to understand the workings of the universe, and maths was the master key.

5:49 D enriched his studies with travel in Zurich and Antwerp, he obtained more books to swell his library. He journeyed to Paris, too, where he lectured in algebra at the prestigious University of Louvain. Near Brussels, he spent time with the celebrated map makers Yemaphrisius and Gerardus Marcatur. By his late twenties, John d was squarely a member of Europe's intellectual elite. He had a gleaming career ahead of him, and he received numerous offers of work. He refused them all, preferring instead to return to England. Back in London, Dee attached himself to the court of King Edward the sixth. Then, in fifteen fifty three, Edward died and after a short power struggle, his sister Mary claimed the throne. While Edward

6:53 had been Protestant, the new queen was a devout Catholic. She was determined to reverse the religious reforms of the previous reign and restore papal authority. She dusted off old heresy laws, which gave the the power to root out and prosecute anyone who refused to conform. John Dee's father, Roland, fell foul of the regime change and was thrown into jail.

7:23 His property was seized and his reputation destroyed. D himself had been reliant on his father for an income, and his position was now dangerously fragile. At Smithfield, a busy London meat market, heretics were burnt at the stake. The air was filled with their agonizing screams and with the stench of smoldering flesh. England was febrile and paranoid. D knew that above all Queen Mary feared her half sister, the Protestant Prince Sess Elizabeth, was young, popular, and next in line to the throne. Mary kept a watchful eye on her sibling, at one point imprisoning her in the Tower of London. In fifteen fifty five, the Queen announced that she was expecting an heir. At last, the Catholic succession would be secure. Mary's physicians believed that the baby

8:37 would be born in late spring, and the queen withdrew into confinement at Hampton Court, palace. As spring turned to summer, Mary remained confined to her chambers, but no baby was born. It was rumored that the Queen was dead, or that the child was dead and another infant swapped in its place. In fact, Mary had never been pregnant at all. She had experiencing what we would call today pseudocyesis a false pregnancy.

9:16 It was a devastating blow, and in the absence of an air, Elizabeth's shadow loomed larger than ever at Hampton Court. The atmosphere was charged with suspicion. Against this backdrop, John d did something risky. He cast a natal reading a detailed horoscope charting the planets at the moment of an individual's birth in order to predict their lifespan. First he mapped the destiny of Queen Mary, then of her husband, King Philip, and finally he sketched the stars for the woman he knew the Queen feared the most her sister.

10:12 In the fourteen hundreds, a soothsayer for King Louis the eleventh of France predicted the death of one of the ladies of the court. She perished within a week, right on schedule, and the king was unnerved. In fact, he felt so threatened by the soothsayer's abilities that he planned to have him killed, launched from a window to his death.

10:38 But first the king addressed the man. You have extraordinary foresight, he said, so when will your own life end? I will die exactly three days before, your majesty. The seer replied. It was a master stroke. The king allowed him to live. Caissaveilis tells this story in her book Prophecy, Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future. As Vailey's points out, the soothsayer's response was a clever piece of self preservation.

11:23 He linked the king's survival to his own, and so the king was motivated to keep him alive. The story suggests something important about the nature of prediction and power, suggests valies. Predictions aren't simply neutral beliefs about the future. They are power plays. They lay claimed the horizon ahead.

11:49 A prediction's accuracy may therefore be less important than who it serves, and with the right moves, the canny forecaster can make themselves indispensable. The inverse is also true. A forecaster who warns of trouble may themselves be seen as a threat. In Tudor, England, word of D's royal horoscopes had spread. They were said to tell of Mary's death and Elizabeth's rise at the Royal Palace, and order went out fine John D and arrest him. Charged with calculating, conjuring and witchcraft. D was stripped of his books and his research and taken into custody. It was treasonous to compass or imagine the death of a king or queen in charting Mary's lifespan, D had done just that. Were the horoscopes and naive blunder on D's part or something

13:07 more cynical in predicting the death of Mary and the coronation of Elizabeth? Was D plainly reporting the data? Or was he betting on the Queen's younger sister as the future of England. If so, it was a perilous strategy. Men found guilty of treason were ritually dragged through the streets, hung until near death, disemboweled and dismembered. D was imprisoned at Hampton Court Palace, where his troubles took an even darker turn. He was accused of another.

13:47 Crime, endeavoring by enchantments to destroy Queen Mary.

13:55 Cautionary tales will return d was examined before a tribunal of Mary's most staunch allies, but the evidence against him was thin and the charges didn't stick. Perhaps his interrogators were mindful of his elite connections. In the end, they let him go, but his ordeal wasn't over. Suspected of heresy, he was now handed over to a bishop known as Bloody Bonner for religious questioning. Dee had escaped being hung, drawn and quartered, but he realized that he might yet be reduced to a pile of ash at Smithfield Market.

14:52 The famous scholar adapted to his predicament, befriending Bloody Bonner and helping him interrogate other prisoners on questions of theology. He walked free, and before long his star was again on the rise. John d She would go on to sit at the right hand of power, advising a monarch on colonial expansion and drafting the blueprints for a British Empire, a phrase he coined. But this isn't a story about how greatness is achieved or how empires are envisaged. It's a story about what happens when a brilliant imagination goes too far. In fifteen fifty eight, Queen Mary began to decline.

15:45 She had believed she was once again pregnant, but once again no baby was born, and she fell into depression. She also began to suffer from fevers, headaches, and loss of vision. She died at the end of that year, aged forty two. The crown now passed to her younger sister Elizabeth. The new queen liked John d, whose once controversial forecasts now appeared to be an impressive track record.

16:19 She asked him to advise on the best date for her coronation. England had been lurching between troubled regimes, and it was essential that Elizabeth's transition to power had all the optics of cosmic legitimacy. Her coronation had to go off without a hitch. This was an important opportunity for D. He could establish himself in a position of royal favor and hopefully gained decent patronage. D set about mapping and measuring the planetary omens, determining that the fifteenth of January fifteen fifty nine was the most auspicious date. This was just a few days away, but Elizabeth wasn't alarmed by the lack of preparation. Time. Instead, Dee's prediction reassured her.

17:15 The court immediately swung into action, allocating roles, scheduling rehearsals, and commissioning artists, goldsmiths and costume makers. The day before the coronation, trumpeters marched through the streets of London. Behind them came Elizabeth, resplendent in Crimson. The procession was greeted by performances, pageants, and well wishers, who lined the streets and offered Elizabeth couquets of flowers.

17:49 I will be as good unto you as ever Queen was to her people, she.

17:55 Pledged before a wrapped audience. On the fifteenth of January. John D had a coveted seat in Westminster Abbey. He watched Elizabeth enter the Great Church in the light of a thousand glowing candles. Clad in purple and earning shimmering with gold and jewels, she was crowned Queen of England. A coronation was perfect. D had triumphed. Under the new regime, John D consolidated his influence as the Queen's favorite astrologist.

18:43 He was a sought after adviser. He moved into foreign policy too, counseling the crown on the arithmetic, geometry and trigonometry at play in navigation. D was called on by the Crown out of allegiance rather than employment. There was no salaried philosopher role at Queen Elizabeth's court, and for D money troubles were never very far away. He got by just about by offering a range of freelance services horoscopes, private tuition, dream readings, but he was always on the lookout for patronage. D moved into a house that belonged to his mother, a tumble down timbered cottage in the village of Mortlake on the River Thames. He was well liked in the neighborhood, where he was known as a peacemaker.

19:43 He was also a source of fascination to the local children, who sometimes ran away from him screaming that he was a conjurer. At the cottage, D installed a magnificent library, thousands of tomes, many of them collected on his travels. There were books in Arabic, Latin, Greek, French, Italian and Hebrew on everything from geography and horology to alchemy and angels.

20:15 D treasured his library and he was anxious about its survival. Sometimes he even had nightmares about it.

20:25 I dreamed that I was dead, and after my bowels were taken out, I walked and talked with the Lord Treasurer, who has come to my house to burn my books.

20:44 There were other wonders at the cottage, too, astronomical instruments, marine compasses, a pair of intricate terrestrial and celestial globes gifted to D by the map maker Mekata. In his study, he kept his prized perspective Class, a kind of early telescope given to D by the English ambassador to brush.

21:10 To the uninitiated viewer, the prospective class seemed to work a strange magic. It made things that were small appear large, and things that were far away seem near. To D. It was a masterpiece of human reason, a window into the hidden laws of nature. D was still intent on deciphering the mysteries of the universe, and Mortlake was the beating heart of his inquiries. The cottage was strategically positioned between the royal palaces, and a steady stream of movers and shakers called in on Dee as they traveled to and fro. They included the explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, the Dutch geographer Abraham Ortelius, and sometimes even Queen Elizabeth herself.

22:13 In the fifteen seventies, around his fiftieth birthday, d married Jane Fromon's, an intelligent, pragmatic, and occasionally hot tempered gentlewoman. Although she was thirty years his junior, the pair formed a deep and enduring partnership. Jane Dee was fiercely loyal to her husband, who began to keep a systematic diary.

22:39 In it, he recorded his wife's health, the births of their children, the weather, his audiences with the Queen, and even his financial troubles, meticulously comparing these events with the movements of the planets and stars. Around the same time, d seized a new work opportunity in England. There was a growing fascination with the Northwest Passage, a waterway believed to cut through the Arctic. At that time, English merchants could only access the spices, silk, and precious metals of the East by southern routes, and that meant risking deadly confrontation with Spain and Portugal. But if the Northwest Passage could be found and claimed, then England would be able to outflank her rivals. It would probably be a much

23:42 quicker routiste too. When a determined explorer called Martin Frobisher announced his intention to find the passage, John Dee was summoned for his sage advice. He gave the mission his whole hearted support. He had studied rare maps with the Great Makata and was convinced that the passage was out there.

24:07 Alongside this intellectual backing, de gave Frobisher and his crew practical support, lessons in geometry and the latest navigational instruments. A company was formed to gather funding for the expedition, and an impressive list of investors poured their coins into sailors, carpenters, anchors, and rigging. In June fifteen seventy six, Crobisher's fleet set a course for the Frozen North. At home in Mortlake, Deepenn new book General and Rare Memorials pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation. In it, he argued that an English expansion into foreign territories was a matter of destiny.

25:01 He was convinced that King Arthur had once conquered lands in the New World, giving Queen Elizabeth sovereign claim to them. Politicians, explorers, and the Queen herself were excited about these ideas, eager to discuss them with him. It was a career high for the scholar, and he planned three more books in the series. On his first voyage north Frobisher didn't find the passage, but he was pretty sure he came close.

25:37 When he returned to England a few months later, he had with him two prizes found on an island, an Inuit man that his crew had kidnapped, and a small piece of black stone. It was the size of a halfpenny loaf, and it sparkled a little in the light. England's foremost metallogists were summoned to examine the stone. Two of them found nothing, but the third, an Italian alchemist, managed to extract a tiny, gleaming fragment. Frobisher hadn't brought back just any black stone. He had brought back gold, or the court fell into a frenzy. Frobisher was sure that the island he had found was stuffed with precious metals, and he predicted that with a little more time he would find the Northwest Passage itself, a gateway to even

26:42 more riches. New missions were organized. This time, miners and metallogists joined the crew. Merchants and noblemen once more clamored to invest, Desperate to get in on the opportunity to be part of something huge. John Dee didn't want to miss out either, and he somehow scrambled together at least twenty five pounds, a hefty sum equivalent to several years' earnings for an Elizabethan laborer. The Queen herself even bet on the scheme, investing money and pledging one of her own vessels loaded with men and equipment. Frobisher's ships again set sail to Arctic glands that now glittered with the promise of God cautionary tales will be back in just a moment. When d wrote about King Arthur and a British empire, was he manipulating the court or did he

27:57 truly believe in Britain's providential destiny. The answer is probably both. D was sure of his own logic, but he also knew that a well timed prediction might nudge reality in the present, bending it towards a future that he was sure would unfold sooner or later. Anyway, this kind of strategic forecasting is still with us. Imagine it's a slightly overcast day, and you're about to leave the house. When you check your weather app you see that there's a fifty percent chance of rain. You decide to bring your umbrella with you. Companies that predict the weather know that if they tell us there's just a twenty percent chance of rain, we might leave that umbrella at home. By inflating the probability of bad weather, they may protect themselves

28:57 from the ire of drenched customers. Ah Something similar happens when it comes to voting for political candidates. Economists have found that when people are shown biased opinion polls, they tend to favor the candidate that those poles flatter. That's understandable. Most of us don't have time to do a deep dive on each and every contender, so we look for shortcuts that can help us make our decision. If others like a candidate, it's not absurd to emulate them. But this also suggests that predictions can guide our actions in the present. Institutions such as the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England play on this phenomenon when they forecast whether interest rates will go up or down. Their predictions

29:50 influence what people choose to do with their money, which then affects interest rates. We are wishful, anxious creatures who crave for certainty rights kurissavellis. Our forecasts can be wishful, too, shape by what we hope will happen. Frobisher made two more trips north. On his last voyage, a terrible storm descended on the fleet. Fog, ice and snow enveloped the ships.

30:28 One vessel sang and two more were blown weeks. Of course, Frobisher never found the Northwest passage, but he did manage to return to the island. His crew hacked away at the promising black Stone and filled their remaining ships with over a thousand tons of it. On the journey home, they met with yet more brutal Arctic storms, and another twenty men were lost. Finally, in late fifteen seventy eight, Frobisher's scattered fleet limped into various English ports. The precious cargo was discharged just outside London, where special furnaces had been constructed for it. Now began the sweltering work of extracting gold. D was on the commission that oversaw the process.

31:30 The lumps of rock were ground down and baked until fiery hot, but when the clouds of smoke cleared, there was only disappointment. Frobisher, it turned out, had brought home pi rite, also known as fool's gold. The expedition had gambled with the fortunes of some of the most important people in England and lost staggering sums of money. With its cargo practically worthless, the company couldn't pay its sailors and shipwrights. It went into receivership, and its chief financier was thrown into jail. Brass buckles, plating newly minted coins, all sorts of things glitter like gold, but only pyrite belongs to fools. The folly isn't in the rock itself.

32:38 It's in the eye of the wishful beholder, whose desire tricks their judgment. Frobisher was ambitious and d had imagined a glorious destiny, a British empire providentially justified by King Arthur's ancient conquests. Their hopeful predictions about the future shaped their confidence, as well as the confidence of others. Passage was elusive, the northern terrain was hostile. Two experts deemed the lump of black rock worthless, but these events were interpreted as setbacks to be negotiated rather than endpoints, and so the mission pressed on. Predictions aren't dangerous because they can be wrong, but because we can get attached to them and fail to change our minds. Optimism is essential to exploration and discovery, but it must be carefully audited.

33:49 Living too much in an imagined future can be very costly in the present. John Dee was broke, and perhaps even worse, the mission's failure was embarrassing for him. He had put his intellectual weight behind Frobisher, who'd found nothing. There was increasing skepticism about Dee's belief that King Arthur had conquered parts of the New World. He continued to advise explorers, but he found himself sidelined from the Queen's plans for colonial expansion. He also couldn't find a publisher for his three remaining books on navigation. For a public intellectual whose worth was anchored to his knowledge of the world and his ability to be right, the loss of his reputation must have been devastating. D now retreated, keeping

34:58 a measure of distance from court. He realized that after years of travel, of dialogue with other scholars and of reading book upon books, he still hadn't got to the heart of the universe. The physical world had let him down. He was also over fifty years old, a significant age in Tudor terms. Time was running out for him. He didn't abandon his quest, but he decided to redirect it.

35:36 John D's royal horoscopes had won him favor with the Queen, but his predictions about the Northwest Passage had made him a fool. Forecasts were the key to everything, knowledge, favor, patronage. But De realized that if he couldn't trust his own calculations, he would need the help of a higher and unshakable authority.

36:05 In Elizabethan, England, the planets and stars weren't the only window to the future. It was widely accepted, including by the most powerful statesman, that angels could be summoned to predict what lay ahead. D was particularly interested in the Angelic language, a lost tongue thought to mirror the very structure of creation. This wasn't just an occult project, it was a mathematical bond too. D believed that the Angelic language was encrypted in a divine cipher. The same skills that had helped him map the stars and build a mechanical beetle could also reveal the source code for the universe.

36:56 He couldn't contact the angels or hear the code directly, however, writing in his diary, he set down a wish, Oh Lord Jesus Christ, a.

37:07 Most humbly beggariar divine majesty, to send me the timely help of some pious wise man and expert philosopher.

37:17 The pious expert d Sword was a scria, a seer who invoked divine beings by peering into a reflective surface known as a showstone, usually a mirror or crystal ball. There were Charlatans in their ranks, as in any trade, a true scrier was often a social outcast and a little bit odd. In December fifteen eighty one, he began working with one Barnabas Saul.

37:57 I willed the scria to look into my great crystalline globe to see if God had sent his holy angel an I L.

38:08 Saul report thought it that Anil was indeed there, d was a little dubious, so he pressed the scrier for verification. At that moment another angel appeared. Apparently this was the real Annil. He was dressed in robes that glittered like gold, and beams of light poured from around his head like.

38:35 Star beams blazing his eyes fiery.

38:41 D could see none of this himself. It was Saul's vision, but he wrote it all down in detail. Next, the skriier saw a profusion of human skulls and a white dog with a long head. The archangel Michael appeared, and Anil beseeched D to pray continually before he bid D E farewell, and I L reconfirmed who he was spelling out his name A N N A E L. D, who had been growing increasingly excited, was now a little perplexed, and A L was spelled with one N, not two.

39:37 Surely the angel knew how to spell his own name. A couple of months later, D made a note in his diary barnabas Saul had been hauled to Westminster on criminal charges, though he didn't specify what these were. In the end, Saul was acquitted, but his glittering promise had evaporated. He told D that the angels were no longer in contact with him. D was suspicious, and they went their separate ways. Saul's departure left a space open in D's household, and before long another man had stepped in to fill it.

40:25 In March fifteen eighty two, there was a knock at the cottage door. Two men stood outside. One was an agent who connected scholars and sqriers with potential patrons. The other man was strange to D. Although he was young, in his mid twenties. He walked with the help of a staff. A cowl kept his face in shadow. He cut an intriguing figure, and D invited both men to dinner that night. He looked to the heavens and was stunned by what he saw. I seem to be on fire and to grow red like blood as.

41:13 It's spread in different directions.

41:17 DE watched as extraordinary clouds of crimson seeped towards the southern horizon. Something momentous had begun. What it was will be revealed next time on Cautionary Tales. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wires, additional sound design like Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio and Dan Jackson Bender. Dafh Haffrey edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Genevieve Gaunt, ed gohen Stella, Harford Massa m Monroe, Jamal Westman, and Rufus Wright. The show

42:30 also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review really does make a difference to us. And if you want to hear it, add free and receive a bonus audio episode, video episode, and members only newsletter every month. Why not join the Cautionary Club. To sign up, head to patreon dot com slash Cautionary Club. That's Patreon, p A, t R e o N dot com slash Cautionary Club.