The Alchemical Patronage of Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley

vessels was valued at over £4,000. 31 The courtiers expected a massive return on their
investments.
All those involved would be disappointed. Frobisher could not find any ore in the
previous location, and instead mined over 158 tons of ore from nearby Baffin Island. 32
When Frobisher returned to England in September 1577, the government stored the ore
under intense security in Bristol. 33 It seems that in the mean time Agnello had been
replaced as the chemical expert for the assays by the Queen‘s German doctor Burchard
Kranich, often referred to by contemporaries as Dr. Burcot. Kranich had been involved in
English mining ventures from at least 1553, without success. 34 There is little information
about his medical practice, although Gervase Markham‘s The English Housewife (1615)
attributed various chemical medicines to a manuscript supposedly written by both Kranich
and Cecil‘s physician Eliseus Bomelius. 35
Two previously overlooked pieces of evidence suggest that Kranich also brought
alchemical knowledge to bear on the ore. Firstly, in Richard Eden‘s 1573 appeal for a
license to practice alchemy, he cites the example of one ―Brocardus‖, a Latinised version of
Burchard, as a foreigner who was allowed to attempt transmutation unhindered. 36 That
there were no other prominent Burchards in England at the time suggests that Eden
thought Kranich was engaged in alchemy. Secondly, Reginald Scot in his chapter devoted
to debunking alchemists within Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), focused on the ―manie
alcumysticall cousenages wrought by Doctor Burcot‖. 37 These, along with Kranich‘s
prominent position as a Court physician, suggest that his alchemical knowledge would have
been well known to the investors who appointed him. Stanton J. Linden‘s study of Scot‘s
31 Ibid., pp. 12-22.
32 Ibid, pp.34-37.
33 Ibid, p.35.
34 John Bennell, ‗Kranich, Burchard (d. 1578)‘, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Sept 2004;
online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/52152].
35 Gervase Markham, Michael Best (ed.), The English Housewife, London, 1615, Reprinted, 1994, p. 8.
36 Richard Eden to Queen Elizabeth, 1572, Reprinted and trans. in Arber (ed.), The First Three English Books on
America, pp xlv; Aziz Suryal Atiya, The Crusade in the Later Middle Ages, London, 1938, p. 95.
37 Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584, reprinted New York, 1989, p. 209.
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