The Alchemical Patronage of Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley

led him to back a number of alchemical schemes designed to relieve strained Crown
finances. When—amidst the financial crises of the 1560s—Cornelius de Lannoy wrote to
Cecil promising alchemical riches, Cecil arranged for the alchemist to travel to England,
obtained his alchemical equipment, and kept himself informed of every stage of the project.
When de Lannoy attempted to flee the country, rather than assume him to be a fraud and
abandon the project, Cecil instead assumed that the alchemist had succeeded in his aims.
Once he had de Lannoy securely confined, Cecil again provided the expensive equipment
needed for transmutation.
Much later, in the 1580s and 1590s when war with Spain stretched royal resources
to breaking point, Cecil again sought an alchemical solution. He went to enormous lengths
to bring the alchemist Edward Kelley back to England. Not only did he and the Queen
enter into correspondence with Kelley, offering rich rewards for his alchemical skills, Cecil
also put the extensive resources of his European intelligence network behind an effort to
unearth Kelley‘s secret. Belief in the alchemist‘s potential died hard, and Cecil‘s attempts to
return Kelley to England continued long after the alchemist‘s imprisonment. In the
aftermath of this failure, Cecil played a central role in the Elizabethan Court‘s attempts to
profit from the alchemical equipment of Clement Oldfield and Roloff Peterson, first
coordinating attempts to evaluate the equipment‘s legitimacy, then attempts to sell it in
Europe.
To Cecil, alchemy also had the potential to aid in England‘s industrial growth.
Unlike his patronage of attempts to transmute base metals into gold for the Crown
Treasury, these projects played a coherent part in Cecil‘s economic policy. The bubble of
speculation surrounding Martin Frobisher‘s ore in 1577 centred around two alchemists,
Giovanni Baptista Agnello and Burchard Kranich. Cecil, one of the key investors and
administrators of the project, knew of both men‘s alchemical backgrounds, having been
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