[John] Dee's work over the course of several years on behalf of Queen Elizabeth is the prime English example of historically based claims to the New World. Dee, an acclaimed scientist and mathematician who was closely involved with early English voyages to America led by Humphrey Gilbert and Martin Frobisher,
8 wrote several texts largely dedicated to proving that England had a better claim to much of America than other European nations because British subjects had "discovered, and inhabited in divers maners" various portions of the New World before Columbus or Vespucci ever sailed.
9 These tracts were compiled in a small manuscript volume titled
Brytanici Imperii Limites, dated 1576.
10 Dee met with the queen, and later her treasurer Lord Burghley, three times from 1577 to 1580 to make the case that King Arthur, King Malgo, the Welsh Prince Madoc, St. Brendan the Navigator, an Oxford friar, and the Scottish Prince Icarus had all trafficked in the New World long before the fifteenth century.
11 The adventures of these medieval British explorers and settlers are now—and were often then—recognized as fictions. Dee nevertheless presented these narratives as legal proofs of English sovereignty over America, in accordance with the standard procedure of making property claims based on historical precedents.
12 Although Elizabeth heard Dee out with some enthusiasm, she never took any action on the basis of his recommendations.
Dee, of course, maintained that his narratives were historical, but his contemporary Edmund Spenser insisted on classifying such stories as fiction.
According to Dee, in the sixth century King Arthur established holdings not only in Iceland and Greenland, but in the northern New World lands that speculatively filled sixteenth-century maps: Grocland, Friseland, Estotiland, and Icaria. This claim has a poetic doppelganger in Book 2 of
The Faerie Queene. The Faery knight Guyon, reading a volume called
Antiquitie of Faerie lond, learns that the first of the Faery kings, who "to them selues all Nations did subdew: / . . . / Was
Elfin; him all
Indiaobayd, / And all that now
Americamen call."
13 Elfin, ancient conqueror of America, suggests Dee's Arthur in several ways. Elfin's descendents Elficleos, Oberon, and Tanaquill clearly figure the Tudors, Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth, who were thought to descend from Arthur's royal line, as Spenser mentions at the beginning of the canto (2.10.4).
14 Elfin's rule over America predates Elficleos/Henry VII by many generations, just as Arthur's New World settlement preempted the discovery of America (which occurred during Henry VII's reign) by centuries.
Originally Posted by Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33.1 (2003) 125-141
[John] Dee's work over the course of several years on behalf of Queen Elizabeth is the prime English example of historically based claims to the New World. Dee, an acclaimed scientist and mathematician who was closely involved with early English voyages to America led by Humphrey Gilbert and Martin Frobisher, 8 wrote several texts largely dedicated to proving that England had a better claim to much of America than other European nations because British subjects had "discovered, and inhabited in divers maners" various portions of the New World before Columbus or Vespucci ever sailed. 9 These tracts were compiled in a small manuscript volume titled Brytanici Imperii Limites, dated 1576. 10 Dee met with the queen, and later her treasurer Lord Burghley, three times from 1577 to 1580 to make the case that King Arthur, King Malgo, the Welsh Prince Madoc, St. Brendan the Navigator, an Oxford friar, and the Scottish Prince Icarus had all trafficked in the New World long before the fifteenth century. 11 The adventures of these medieval British explorers and settlers are now—and were often then—recognized as fictions. Dee nevertheless presented these narratives as legal proofs of English sovereignty over America, in accordance with the standard procedure of making property claims based on historical precedents. 12 Although Elizabeth heard Dee out with some enthusiasm, she never took any action on the basis of his recommendations.
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