Vol. 23 No. 8 · 19 April 2001
pages 3-8 | 6784 words
The Last Years of Edward Kelley, Alchemist to the Emperor
Charles Nicholl
The winter night falls early in the small Czech town of Sobeslav, and with it comes a cold, creeping fog laced with coal-smoke that leaves a bitter coating in the mouth. The town square is deserted; the tall-spired church a hulk. There is a cramped little beer-cellar full of gaming machines, but it is decidedly not the old ‘inn’ which stood on the square in the days when Sobeslav was a staging-post between Prague and the southern stronghold of Cesky Krumlov, seat of the powerful Rozmberk family. It was at this inn, on the evening of 3 May 1591, that the English alchemist, clairvoyant and con-man Edward Kelley was arrested by officers of Emperor Rudolf II. At the time of his arrest Kelley was an internationally famous figure, but thereafter the story grows confused: he disappears from view into the dungeons of 16th-century Bohemia. News of his death reached England in late 1595, and for a long time this provided the death-date in such biographies of him as existed (there is still no full biography). But the report was false. He is discernible in Bohemian documents for a couple of years after this: the date of his death is more probably November or December 1597, at the age of 42. I have always had a sneaking fascination for Kelley, and hoped that a visit to the Czech Republic might shed some light on the foggy circumstances of his last years.
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Letters
Vol. 23 No. 10 · 24 May 2001
From Liam Mac Cóil
Early one morning I was reading An Leabhar Muimhneach, one of those voluminous compilations which once helped the Irish trace their nobility back to Adam. Then the post came and with it the LRB. At lunchtime I read Charles Nicholl's account (19 April) of Edward Kelley's Bohemian knighthood: 'he is henceforth Sir Edward Kelley of Imamyi … a mysterious and probably fictitious Irish name.' The genealogies, which I had just been reading, make the Uí Cheallaigh (O'Kelly, Kelly) descendants of Maine. The Uí Mhaine (Hy-Many, Imany) held territory in Connaught, more precisely in east Galway and south Roscommon. It would have been quite normal and proper, therefore – orthography and phrasing aside – for someone called Kelly to say that he was of the noble 'house of Imamyi in the county of Conneghaku', and only a little exhibitionistic.
Liam Mac Cóil
Ráth Cairn, Co. na Mí
Vol. 23 No. 16 · 23 August 2001
From Henry Schermer
Charles Nicholl (LRB, 19 April) writes of the Church of the Assumption in Most, northern Bohemia, that it was 'moved, brick by brick', when the old town was demolished to open up the coal mines fifty years ago. Can there be a more dramatic way of moving a church? In this case there was. The church was helpfully close to the railway line and a short branch line was constructed linking the two. A wheeled undercarriage was then built beneath the church and it was moved, I think, some five hundred metres or more to an area of town near the railway station, which was being preserved. The former Gymnasium, where my father was a pupil at the end of the 19th century, is among the buildings that remain. There is another open-cast mine where the village of Ervenice, in which my mother spent her childhood, once stood.
Henry Schermer
Stoke-on-Trent
