The Alchemical Patronage of Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley

The Frobisher voyages and the associated industrial scale assays had come at huge
expense. According to Hogarth et al, ―they had cost £19,200, two ships, about 22 boats and
pinnaces, and at least 24 lives‖. 47 Whilst Lok bore the brunt of the financial cost, Court
investors were loath to accept such a failure, and assays of the ore continued until July
1583. 48 Eventually the ore was abandoned as worthless. 49
The project does, however, reveal several characteristics about the Elizabethan
Court‘s attitude to alchemy. Two of the assayers of Frobisher‘s ore were alchemists of
some repute: a fact that does not seem to have dissuaded the majority of England‘s
courtiers and politicians from investing in the scheme. In fact they may have seen alchemy
as necessary for the success of the project. News of the precious metal content of the ore
had surprised both English courtiers and Spanish spies. It conflicted with their
understanding of gold and silver as ‗hot‘ metals which required intense occult influences
from the sun to be formed in the earth. 50 They could not form in colder climates such as
Baffin Island. Sir Philip Sidney, an alchemical pupil of John Dee and friend of Edward
Dyer, who invested £200 in the project, expressed his surprise that ―precious metals were
produced in a region so far to the north‖, whilst the Spanish Ambassador wrote to King
Philip II, observing that ―it is incomprehensible that a land so cold as this can produce
anything‖. 51 From this perspective, the involvement of alchemists, with their experience in
simulating the solar heat by which metals were thought naturally to transmute, would have
logically been advantageous.
In many ways the Frobisher voyages demonstrate the difficulty in differentiating
between alchemy and chemistry in the period; to contemporaries they were inextricably
47 Hogarth, Boreham, and Mitchell, Mines, Minerals & Metallurgy, p. 52.
48 Ibid., pp.93-94.
49 Donald Hogarth and John Loop‘s study of the minerals from the location of Frobisher‘s mine determined
the ore to be primarily Hornblend, containing quantities of silver and gold around one thousandth of that
suggested by Agnello, Shutz and Kranich. See Hogarth and Loop, ‗Precious Metals‘, pp. 261-62.
50 Georgius Agricola, De Re Metallica, 1556, Hebert Hoover (trans.), London, 1912, p. 44.
51 Philip Sidney to Hubert Languet, 1 October 1577, in Philip Sidney and Steuart A. Pears(eds.) The
Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet, Steuart A. Pears (trans.), London, 1845, p. 119; Don
Bernardino de Mendoza to King Philip II, 15 November 1578, quoted in James McDermott, Martin Frobisher:
Elizabethan Privateer, New Haven, 2001, p. 157.
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