Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - The Queen's Astrologer: The Price of Prophecy (Part 1)

Episode Date: May 8, 2026

In Tudor England, the line between mathematics and the mystic arts is vanishingly thin. Straddling both worlds is John Dee, a brilliant scholar and astrologer whose intellect grants him access to the highest circles of power. Dee navigates the politics of the court by making bold prophecies, which win him royal favour. But even correct predictions may come with a price - and laying claim to the future is a dangerous game.  For a list of sources, see the show notes at timharford.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than adds supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined.

Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-I-Hart. Pushkin. June 1555. 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. I have no chains in sight. But make no mistake, John D is a prisoner. Hampton Court Palace hums with anxious courtiers. Queen Mary has announced that she is expecting an heir, so she too is confined to her chambers. Her advisers 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 Dee 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 Dee was a prodigy. He was born in London in 1527, where his father, was a wealthy cloth merchant and courtier. Roland 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 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 in 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 15, Dee 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. 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, Dee also tried his hand at engineering,

building an enormous dung beetle for a production of Aristophanes' piece. Midplay, the beetle leapt into the air. As Dee recalled, A great wondering, and many vain reports, spread abroad of the means how that was affected. The audience was shocked, convinced that this was some sort of demonic magic. In fact, it was a triumph of mechanics. Dee'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. But Dee paid 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. Dee was determined to understand the workings of the universe, and maths was the master key. 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 Levant near Brussels, he spent time with the celebrated mapmakers, Yemophysius and Gerardus Maccater. By his late 20s, 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 VI.

Then in 1553, Edward died, and after a short power struggle, his sister Mary claimed the throne. While Edward 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 crown 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.

His property was seized, and his reputation, destroyed. Dee 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 agonising screams and with the stench of smouldering flesh, England was febrile and paranoid. Dee knew that, above all, Queen Mary feared her half-sister. The Protestant Princess 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 1555, the Queen announced. that she was expecting an heir. At last, the Catholic succession would be secure. Mary's physicians believed that the baby 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 rumoured 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'd been experiencing what we would call today pseudosaesis of false pregnancy. It was a devastating blow. And in the absence of an air, Elizabeth Shadow loomed larger than ever. At Hampton Court, the atmosphere was charged with suspicion. Against this backdrop, John Dee 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. In the 1400s, a soothsayer for King Louis X 11th 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. 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 masterstroke. The king allowed him to live. Carissa Valy's tells this story in her book,

Prophecy, prediction, power and the fight for the future. As Valy's points out, the soothsayer's response was a clever piece of self-preservation. He linked the king's survival to his own, and so the king was motivated to kill. keep him alive. The story suggests something important about the nature of prediction and power, suggests Valy's. Predictions aren't simply neutral beliefs about the future. They are power plays. They lay claim to the horizon ahead. 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 Dee's Royal Horoscopes had spread. They were said to tell of Mary's death and Elizabeth's rise. At the Royal Palace, an order went out. find John D and arrest him. Charged with calculating, conjuring, and witchcraft, Dee 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, Dee had done just that. Were the horoscopes a naive blunder on Dee's part or something more cynical? In predicting the death of Mary and the coronation of Elizabeth, was Dee 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, dragged through the streets, hung until near death, disemboweled, and dismembered.

Dee was imprisoned at Hampton Court Palace, where his troubles took an even darker turn. He was accused of another crime. Endeavouring by enchantments to destroy Queen Mary. Portionary tales will return. Indian women are looking for more. More out of themselves. their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.

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Dee 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 realised that he might yet be reduced to a pile of ash at Smithfield Market.

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 Dee 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 1558, Queen Mary began to decline. 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 42.

The crown now passed to her younger sister, Elizabeth. The new queen liked John Dee, whose once controversial forecasts now appeared to be an impressive track record. 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 Herbeth'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 Dee. He could establish himself in a position of royal favour

and hopefully gained decent patronage. Dee set about mapping and measuring the planetary omens, determining that the 15th of January, 1559 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. 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 and crimson. The procession was greeted by performances, pageants, and well-wishers who lined the streets and offered Elizabeth bouquets of flowers. I will be as good unto you as ever Queen was to her people.

She pledged before a rapt audience. On the 15th of January, John Dee had a coveted seat. 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. The coronation was perfect. Dee had triumphed. Under the new regime, John Dee consolidated his influence. As the Queen's favourite astrologist, he was a sought-after advisor. He moved into foreign policy too,

counselling the Crown on the arithmetic, geometry and trigonometry at play in navigation. Dee 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 Dee, 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. Dee moved into a house that belonged to his mother,

a tumble-down, timbered cottage in the village of Mort Lake on the River Thames. He was well liked in the neighbourhood, where he was known as a peacemaker. 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, Dee 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.

Dee treasured his library and he was anxious about its survival. Sometimes he even had nightmares about it. 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. 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 mapmaker MacCator. In his study, he kept his prized perspective glass, a kind of early telescope given to D by the English ambassador to Brussels. To the uninitiated viewer, the perspective class seemed to work a strange magic.

It made things that were small appear large, and things that were far away seemed near. To Dee, 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 inondy as they travelled to and fro. They included the explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, the Dutch geographer Abraham Ortelius,

and sometimes even Queen Elizabeth herself. In the 1570s, around his 50th birthday, D married Jane Fromonts, an intelligent, pragmatic and occasionally hot-tempered gentlewoman. Although she was 30 years his junior, the pair formed a deep and enduring partnership. Jane D. was fiercely loyal to her husband, who began to keep a systematic diary. 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, Dee 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 quicker route. East too. When a determined explorer called Martin Froebyshire announced his intention to find the passage, John Dee was summoned for his sage advice. He gave the mission his whole-hearted support. He'd studied rare maps with the great Macaeta and was convinced that the passage was out

there. Alongside this intellectual backing, Dee gave Froebusier 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 1576, Froebyshire's fleet set a course for the frozen north. At home in Mortlake, D-Pend a 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.

He was convinced that King Arthur had once conquered lands in the new world, giving Queen Elizabeth a sovereign claim to the world, 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, Froebusier didn't find the passage, but he was pretty sure he came close. 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 half-penny loaf, and it sparkled a little in the light.

England's foremost metallurgists were summoned to examine the stone. Two of them found nothing, but the third, an Italian alchemist, managed to examine the stone, managed. to extract a tiny, gleaming fragment. Frobyshire hadn't brought back just any black stone. He'd brought back gold ore. The court fell into a frenzy. Frobyshire was sure that the island he'd 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 more. riches. New missions were organized. This time, miners and metallurgists joined the crew. Merchants and noblemen once more clamoured to invest, desperate to get in on the opportunity to be part of something huge. John D. didn't want to miss out either, and he somehow scrambled together at least 25 pounds, a hefty sum, equivalent to several years' earnings for an Elizabeth. Ethan Laborer. The Queen herself even bet on the scheme,

investing money and pledging one of her own vessels. Loaded with men and equipment, Frobyshire ships again set sail to Arctic lands that now glittered with the promise of gold. Cautionary tales will be back

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That's iHeartadvertising.com. When Dee wrote about King Arthur and a British Empire, was he manipulating the court, or did he truly believe in Britain's providential destiny? The answer is probably both. Dee 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 we 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 50% chance of rain. You decide to bring your umbrella with you. Companies that predict the weather know that if they tell us, as there's just a 20% chance of rain, we might leave that umbrella at home. By inflating the probability of bad weather, they may protect themselves from the ire of

drenched customers. 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 favour the candidate that those polls 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 influence what people choose to do with their money, which then affects interest

rates. We are wishful, anxious creatures who crave for certainty, writes Carissa Velies. Our forecasts can be wishful too, shaped by what we hope will happen. Frobyshire made two more trips north. On his last voyage, a terrible storm descended on the fleet. Fog, ice and snow enveloped the ships. One vessel sank, and two more were blown weeks off course. Probyshire never found the northwest passage, but he did manage to return to the island.

His crew hacked away at the promising blackboard. 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 20 men were lost. Finally, in late 1578, Froebusier'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. The lumps of rock were ground down and baked until fiery hot.

But when the clouds of smoke cleared, there was only disappointment. Froebusier, it turned out, had brought home pyrite, 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, it's in the eye of the wishful beholder, whose desire tricks their judgment. Frobyshire was ambitious, and Dee 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. The passage was elusive. The northern terrain was hostile. Two experts deemed the lump of black rock worthless. But these events were in.

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, 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'd put his intellectual weight behind Froebyshire, 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 a measure of distance from court. He realized that after years of travel, of dialogue with other scholars, and of reading book upon book, he still hadn't got to the heart of the universe. The physical world had let him down. He was also over 50 years old, significant age in Tudor terms, time was running out for him. He didn't abandon his quest,

but he decided to redirect it. John Dee's royal horoscopes had won him favour with the Queen, but his predictions about the Northwest Passage had made him a fool. Forecasts were the key to everything, knowledge, favour, patronage, But Dee realized that if he couldn't trust his own calculations, he would need the help of a higher and unshakable authority. 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. Dee 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 one too. Dee believed that the angelic language was encrypted in a divine cipher, the same skills that had helped him map the stars and build him. mechanical beetle, could also reveal the source code for the universe. 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, I most humbly beg your divine majesty to send me the timely help of some pious, wise man and expert philosopher.

The pious expert D. Sword was a scryer, 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 scryer was often a social outcast and a little bit odd. In December 1581, he began working with one Barnabas Saul. I willed the scryer to look into my great crystalline globe, to see if God had sent his holy angel, Aniel. Saul reported that Aniel was indeed there. D was a little dubious, so he pressed the scryer for verification. At that moment, another angel appeared. Apparently this was the real Anail. He was dressed in robes that glittered like gold, and beams of light poured from around his head.

Like starbeams, blazing, his eyes fiery. Dee could see none of this himself. It was Saul's vision, but he wrote it all down. in detail. Next, the scrya saw a profusion of human skulls and a white dog with a long head. The archangel Michael appeared and Aniel beseeched D to pray continually. Before he bid D farewell, Aniel reconfirmed who he was, spelling out his name. A N, N, A E L. Hmm. D, who had been growing increasingly excited, was now little perplexed. An A.L was spelled with one N, not two.

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 Dee that the angels were no longer in contact with him. Dee was suspicious, and they went their separate ways. Saul's departure left a little bit of them. space open in Dee's household, and before long, another man had stepped in to fill it.

In March 1582, there was a knock at the cottage door. Two men stood outside. One was an agent who connected scholars and scryers with potential patrons. The other man was strange to Dee. 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 Dee invited both men to dinner. That night he looked to the heavens and was stunned by what he saw. The skies seemed to be on fire and to grow red like blood as it spread in different direction. D 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.com. Cautionary Tales is where we're. 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 Wise. Additional sound design by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio and Dan Jackson. Ben Nadav Haferi edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Melanie Guthridge, Genevieve Gaunt,

Ed Gohan, Stella Harford, Masea O'Meuf. Monroe, Jamal Westman, and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, 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. It 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

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