Edward Kelley: What an Alchemist Really Did

Garland was not just anyone. He had arrived eight days earlier as the envoy of the Tsar of Muscovy, who was inviting Dee into his service. The demonstration took place in front of a witness who would carry the story to a royal court, and Dee notes that the projection was done to please Garland and his brother Francis. This is the story of the laboratory where that happened and of the man who worked in it, told from a diary, the letters of England's Lord Treasurer, the newsletters of the Fugger banking house and a castle steward's bill for firewood and guards. It ends with a cup of water.

An apothecary from Worcester

Edward Kelley was born on August 1, 1555, in Worcester, at four in the afternoon. We know this because John Dee cast his horoscope and wrote the birth data into his almanac; the leaf is now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Before that, the record is thin. Elias Ashmole, the seventeenth-century collector who gathered everything he could find about Dee and Kelley, noted a report at third hand: the astrologer William Lilly had heard from a certain John Evans, who knew Kelley's sister in Worcester, that she had shown him some of the gold her brother had made, and that Kelley had first been an apothecary in Worcester.

An apothecary. That fits everything that follows. Anyone trained in an apothecary's shop knew distillation and sublimation, the weighing of tiny quantities, and how to handle mercury, antimony and vitriol. In the sixteenth century alchemy was a trade with workshops, suppliers and a technical literature, and apothecaries were among those who practiced it.

The other trail is darker. The antiquary John Weever wrote in 1631 that Kelley, otherwise called Talbot, had lost both ears at Lancaster, the pillory punishment for forgers. A Bohemian alchemist, Simon Tadeas Budek, described him around 1604 as a man without ears and with long hair. An English envoy reported from Prague in 1593 that an imperial councilor had asked him about the mutilation of one of Kelley's ears. Three testimonies, none firsthand, disagreeing on the number. The only certainty is that Kelley did not take off his hat, not even for prayer; Dee complained about it on May 4, 1582.

At the time Kelley still called himself Talbot. Under that name he turned up at Dee's house in Mortlake near London in March 1582, twenty-six years old, and offered to look into Dee's crystal. What followed is told in our article on the Enochian language, John Dee and the linguists: seven years of angel conversations, a dictated language, a journey to Krakow and Prague. Here the subject is the other half of the partnership, the one that barely appears in the records of the scrying sessions and all the more in the diary: the laboratory.

What an alchemist did: the laboratory

To understand what happened in Trebon, you have to correct the picture of the alchemist that Romanticism left behind: the brooding sage trying to read gold out of symbols. The historian of science Lawrence Principe of Johns Hopkins University, a chemist who has recreated old alchemical recipes in the laboratory, describes the profession more soberly in The Secrets of Alchemy. Already around the year 300, Zosimos of Panopolis listed equipment for distilling, subliming, filtering and fixing, much of it borrowed from the kitchen and from perfume making; the water bath still carries the name of an alchemist, the bain-marie, after Maria the Jewess. Alchemists, Principe shows, contributed to mining and metallurgy, to pharmacy and to medicine.

What they actually did can be summed up in four verbs that all appear in Dee's diary: heat, dissolve, distill, weigh. And a fifth that was rarer and decided everything: project, meaning to throw a tiny amount of the finished stone or powder onto a molten base metal, in the hope that it would turn into gold or silver.

The diary shows the daily routine behind this. On November 19, 1586, Dee goes to the glass house, the Rosenberg glassworks where the flasks and retorts a laboratory consumed were blown. On March 24, 1588, he notes that Kelley put the glass in dung. That sounds strange and was routine: a vessel was buried in fermenting horse manure, whose steady warmth over weeks was supposed to bring about a digestion, a slow cooking of the contents. On August 24, 1588, Dee writes that he saw the divine water, demonstrated by his incomparable friend Edward Kelley at three in the morning. In the same period he records the two men sharing out an intermediate product like partners dividing a shipment, and Dee bringing his own scales because he did not quite trust his partner's.

The equipment that appears in Dee's diary, 1586 to 1588

Apparatus	What it did	Diary trace
Athanor	a slow-burning furnace for steady heat over days	constant firing in the lab
Retort and receiver	distillation: vapor rises, drops fall into the receiver	the divine water, 1588
Pelican	a vessel in which vapor condenses and runs back again	long circulations
Water or dung bath	gentle heat for weeks of digestion	the glass put in dung, March 24, 1588
Crucible	the projection: a grain of powder on molten metal	Trebon, December 19, 1586

The fire of December 12, 1587

On the afternoon of December 12, 1587, Kelley's lamp tipped over. Dee describes it like an insurance adjuster: the spirit of wine in the lamp had burned too low, the glass had not been propped with books as usual, so it slid sideways, the spirit ran out, and it burned everything on the table where it stood, linen and written books.

Then he lists what burned. The book of Zacharias with the Alkanor, which Dee himself had translated from French. The third book of one Rowlaschy on the philosophical waters. The book Angelicum Opus, all in pictures, from the beginning of the work to its end. A copy of the conclusions on the transmutation of metals by a man from Budweis. And forty leaves in quarto titled Extractiones Dunstani, which Kelley had excerpted from Dunstan's book. The book of Dunstan itself, Dee adds, survived only because it had been thrown onto the bed next to the table.

This paragraph is the most precise description we have of Kelley's workplace, and it came about by accident: a table where laboratory glass and manuscripts lie side by side, books used as props for equipment, a spirit lamp for small batches, translations, excerpts, a picture book of the work. And it names the book on which Kelley's whole reputation turned, the book of Dunstan, supposedly by Saint Dunstan, the tenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury. Ashmole wrote in 1652 that it was commonly reported that Dee and Kelley had found a large quantity of the elixir in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey. Ashmole himself calls it a report, and Dee's diaries do not support it. What is certain is that the book existed, that it lay on a bed in Trebon on December 12, 1587, and that it is now lost.

"The great secret": May 10, 1588

The winter of 1587 to 1588 was the low point of the partnership. In April 1587 the figures in the stone, according to Kelley, demanded that the two men share their wives; Dee recorded his anguish and his wife Jane's trembling and in the end gave in. In April 1588 came denunciations, the displeasure of Rosenberg, and Dee's letters of self-defense. And in the middle of it an entry that seems to come from another life. May 10, 1588: E. K. opened to me the great secret, God be thanked.

Dee never says what the secret was. He never writes what is in the glasses. But the following months show that he believed he possessed it. On February 4, 1589, came the settling of accounts: Dee handed Kelley the powder, the books, the glass and the bone, for Lord Rosenberg, and Kelley gave him a receipt signed and sealed in his own hand. On February 16 Kelley rode to Prague. On March 11 Dee left for England with his wife, his children and three coaches. The two men never saw each other again.

The Golden Knight

Kelley stayed in Bohemia, and he rose. In June 1589 he dictated to English visitors at Trebon a report on a plot against Queen Elizabeth that a Jesuit had supposedly told him about in a Prague inn; the paper went to London, and Lord Burghley, the Lord Treasurer, endorsed it as articles concerning the discovery of a treason, made by Sir Edward Kelly, Baron of Bohemia. The alchemist had become an intelligence source, and a nobleman. The historian Charles Nicholl, who reconstructed Kelley's Bohemian years from the Prague archives in 2001, quotes a letter of July 1590 in which Kelley describes estates worth 1,500 pounds a year. Rosenberg had given him property, including Nova Liben near the gold-mining town of Jilove south of Prague.

And England wanted him back. The poet and diplomat Sir Edward Dyer traveled to Prague to fetch him. Dyer later declared that he had seen Kelley put base metal into the crucible, then a very small quantity of the medicine, stir it with a wooden stick, and bring out perfect gold, to the touch, to the hammer, to the test. That is the statement of a man who admired Kelley and must be read that way, but it is documented, and it describes exactly what a projection was supposed to look like.

In May 1591 Burghley himself wrote to Kelley, twice, in his own hand. The letters survive because John Strype printed them in 1737. The first asks for any recipe against gout, his old enemy. The second is a document of raison d'etat: he begs the good knight not to withhold God's gifts from his native country but to help make Her Majesty glorious and victorious against her enemies, and not to let any more time pass, since they are all mortal. In the same letter Burghley records that some ill-disposed people say Kelley is an impostor with his sophistries, as many before him have been convicted. England's most powerful minister wrote to an apothecary from Worcester that the queen's security might depend on his gifts, and mentioned in the same breath that people in London considered him a fraud. Kelley did not come. By the time the letter was sealed, he was probably already in prison.

Arrest, prison and a pond full of fish

On April 26, 1591, Marco Bragadino, a Venetian who had promised gold-making to the Duke of Bavaria, was beheaded in Munich; our article on the gold makers and the gilded gallows tells what happened to alchemists who failed. On May 2, 1591, Rudolf II signed an edict declaring Kelley a criminal and a fugitive. No source says why. Nicholl concludes that nobody knew even then: debts, political suspicion, a duel, court intrigue were all rumored, nothing was established.

The course of events is known from an unpaid bill. The imperial quartermaster who led the arrest was still waiting for his expenses six years later and filed a detailed complaint in 1597. According to it, officials and soldiers with chains and instruments of torture appeared at Kelley's house on April 30 and did not find him; he had vanished the night before so secretly that his own family knew nothing. They thrust halberds through the beds, arrested the servants and sealed the laboratory with all its elixirs. The quartermaster followed him south with twenty-five men in four wagons and found him on May 3 in Sobeslav. On May 6 Kelley was handed over to the castellan of Krivoklat, a castle on a rock above a river fifty kilometers west of Prague. The Fugger newsletters followed him there: he was not even left a bread knife; he was in deepest despair and refused food.

Kelley remained at Krivoklat until October 1593. Dee noted in Mortlake on October 4 that Sir Edward Kelley had been set at liberty by the emperor. An Englishman who visited him soon afterward wrote home that Kelley received him courteously, had him sit at his table at every meal, and had a pond fished so that his guest could take home a good supply of fish. It is one of the few images in which Kelley appears not as alchemist, seer or prisoner, but as a country landowner.

Hnevin, 1596 to 1597

What happened next is again known from a bill. The steward of Hnevin Castle above the north Bohemian town of Most billed the court for firewood and food for the prisoner Kelley, a servant and a guard of four soldiers, for the period November 7, 1596 to November 1, 1597. Kelley had been arrested a second time, this time for debt; his estates were sold below value.

At Hnevin, Kelley wrote. Two treatises on the philosopher's stone, printed in Hamburg in 1676, were composed there, and they open with a dedication to the emperor who held him captive: he had now twice suffered chains and imprisonment in Bohemia, a disgrace done to him in no other part of the world, but his spirit had remained free and exercised itself in the philosophy that only the wicked and foolish despise; it had always been the way of men to release Barabbas and crucify Christ. This is a man who sees himself as a martyr of truth.

How he died is the second great legend, and it comes in four versions. The oldest, from Budek around 1604, says Kelley, with his wooden leg, missing ears and long hair, climbed out of his prison at Christmastime 1597, fell into the moat and broke his other leg in three places; brought back, he asked to see his wife and daughter, spoke with them, drank a cup of water and died. Weever says he fell from the battlements. Arthur Dee, John's son, said decades later that Kelley drugged his guards with opium. Czech local tradition says he poisoned himself. The most likely time of death, Nicholl concludes, is November or December 1597. Kelley was forty-two. The old town of Most was demolished in the 1960s for the lignite beneath it; the cemetery where he may have been buried is now an open-pit mine.

Did Kelley make gold, and did Dee know?

The chemical answer is unambiguous and stands outside any source criticism. Gold is an element. No powder, tincture or furnace turns mercury or lead chemically into gold; only nuclear physics manages that, in particle accelerators, in amounts too small to see. Whatever was in the crucible on December 19, 1586, it was not newly created gold.

That does not settle the historical question; it sharpens it. There are two explanations for how a man whose abilities Dyer, Dee, Rosenberg, Burghley and an emperor considered real staged his demonstrations, and there is no confession for either. The first is fraud: gold hidden in a hollow stirring rod, in a false crucible bottom, gold already contained in the powder. The second is self-deception: Principe has shown that alchemical recipes often worked only because of an unacknowledged or unrecognized ingredient, so that a practitioner could honestly believe a result the chemistry did not support. What the sources support is a distribution of the burden. Kelley was never convicted of fraud; the edict of 1591 gives no reason, and the prison at Most was debt prison.

A footnote for American readers: the Voynich manuscript at Yale's Beinecke Library is often linked to this circle. A letter of 1665 reports that Rudolf II paid 600 ducats for it; the widespread claim that Dee or Kelley sold it to him has no documentary support. If you want the spiritual reading of alchemy that developed long after Kelley, see our guide to spiritual alchemy; Dee's own scrying tools are the subject of our guide on how to make a scrying mirror.

What the sources support, and what is only told

Claim	Source	Status
Kelley performed a projection at Trebon on December 19, 1586, yielding almost an ounce of gold.	Dee's diary (Halliwell 1842)	The diary entry is documented; the gold itself is not
The Trebon lab had a spirit lamp, glassware, crucible and dung bath; manuscripts burned on December 12, 1587.	Dee's diary, 1586 to 1588	Documented
Burghley urged Kelley to return in 1591 and in the same letter mentioned the charge of imposture.	Strype, Annals IV, appendix (1737)	Documented
The red powder came from the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey.	Ashmole, Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652)	Tradition
Kelley lost his ears in the pillory.	Weever 1631; Budek around 1604	Tradition, conflicting
A chemical process can turn base metals into gold.	Chemistry; Principe 2013	Not proven, physically excluded

Voices from practice

Among readers who come to alchemy through modern practice, two reactions to Kelley's story are common. Some are disappointed that the most famous gold maker of the Renaissance turns out to have been a man with debts, lawsuits and a crucible that could not do what he claimed. Others find the documents more fascinating than any legend: a diary that records the tipped lamp, a treasurer who asks for a gout remedy, a castle steward who bills for firewood. People who work with alchemical symbolism in meditation or journaling often say that knowing the real laboratory history makes the symbols more honest, not less powerful.

What we do not promise

We do not claim that alchemy can turn metals into gold, and we do not claim that Kelley did. We also do not claim that he was a conscious fraud; the sources do not allow that judgment. Candle work with solar symbolism, like any ritual, is a tool for focus and intention. It does not produce wealth, success or health on its own, and it is no substitute for professional advice.

Practical: how to read Kelley's story today

• Read the diary itself. Halliwell's 1842 edition is free online and short enough for an evening. Look for the entries named in this article.
• Keep three columns. What someone wrote at the time, what someone said later, and what chemistry allows. Most Kelley lore collapses once it lands in the wrong column.
• Use the symbol, not the claim. If you work with alchemical imagery, the Sun as gold and the slow digestion in the warm bath make good metaphors for patient inner work, without any promise of transmutation.
• Visit the images. Many museums and libraries have digitized alchemical manuscripts; searching their online collections for alchemy or philosopher's stone is a good substitute for the Angelicum Opus that burned in 1587.

Frequently asked questions

What did an alchemist actually do?

In the sixteenth century an alchemist was in practice a laboratory craftsman: he distilled, sublimed, dissolved metals in acids, separated silver from ores, colored alloys and prepared medicines, and on the side searched for the stone that was supposed to turn base metals into gold. John Dee's diary shows exactly this routine: glassworks, spirit lamp, dung bath, scales.

Did Edward Kelley really make gold?

No. Chemically that is impossible, because gold is an element. What is documented is that John Dee recorded on December 19, 1586 that Kelley produced almost an ounce of the best gold before witnesses, and that Sir Edward Dyer said he saw such a demonstration. How the demonstrations worked, by deception or by self-deception about an unrecognized ingredient, is not documented.

Why did Emperor Rudolf II have Kelley arrested?

The edict of May 2, 1591 gives no reason, and the Fugger correspondents in Prague wrote that something seemed to be behind it but they did not yet know what. Contemporaries mentioned debts, a duel, political suspicion and court intrigue. The arrest itself is documented; its cause is not.

How did Edward Kelley die?

Probably in November or December 1597 at Hnevin Castle above the town of Most in Bohemia, where he had been held for debt since November 1596. The oldest account describes an escape attempt, a fall into the moat, a broken leg, a last conversation with his wife and daughter and a cup of water. Other versions speak of a fall from the battlements or of poison.

Was Edward Kelley a fraud?

He was never convicted of fraud. That Rosenberg's secretary called him the deceitful alchemist and that Lord Burghley mentioned London voices calling him an impostor is documented, as opinion. Dee, who saw him daily for seven years, distrusted him in 1582 and believed him in 1588. We classify the fraud thesis as not proven.

What is the connection between Kelley and the Voynich manuscript?

None that can be documented. The manuscript, now at Yale's Beinecke Library, is linked to Rudolf II by a 1665 letter reporting that the emperor paid 600 ducats for it. The popular idea that Dee or Kelley sold it to him is speculation without a source.

Where can I read the original sources?

Dee's private diary, edited by Halliwell in 1842, is online at the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg; Burghley's letters are printed in the appendix of Strype's Annals of the Reformation, volume IV; the Fugger newsletters in the 1924 and 1926 English translation; Kelley's treatises in A. E. Waite's 1893 translation.

Sources and further reading

• John Dee, ed. James Orchard Halliwell: The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee, Camden Society, London 1842 (Internet Archive; Project Gutenberg).
• John Strype: Annals of the Reformation, vol. IV, Oxford 1824 (first printed 1737), appendix, Burghley's letters to Kelley of May 1591.
• Victor von Klarwill (ed.): The Fugger News-Letters, First Series, London 1924, and Second Series, London 1926.
• Charles Nicholl: "The Last Years of Edward Kelley, Alchemist to the Emperor", London Review of Books 23/8, April 19, 2001.
• Lawrence M. Principe: The Secrets of Alchemy, University of Chicago Press, 2013.
• Elias Ashmole: Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, London 1652.
• Edward Kelley, trans. A. E. Waite: The Alchemical Writings of Edward Kelly, London 1893.