Page 10 - Charnock alchemical letter

In the year of our Lord God 1566. I did dedicate a book of
Philosophy to Queen Elizabeth and delivered it to her chief
secretary named secretary Cecil. But because the Queen and her
council had set go on a work in Somerset Place in London before
I came and had wrought there for the space of one year therefore
my book was laid aside for a time, and was put in the Queen’s
Library. And in this book I did write that upon pain of losing my
head that I would do the thing that all this realm should not do
again.

It emerges that William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, had already been
in communication with the alchemist Cornelius de Alneto (latinised as
Alvetanus) who had written a book on the making of the divine elixir or
the philosophers’ stone, which he had dedicated to Elizabeth. He claimed
to Cecil that for an outlay of ten marks of gold he could produce a
thousand within four months. In 1565 he was installed in Somerset house
with an alchemical laboratory. Things did not go well and after a number
of adventures and attempts to flee England Alneto was eventually
imprisoned in the Tower, where he was allowed to continue his
experiments under close scrutiny. This is so ironic as Charnock had
volunteered to be incarcerated in the Tower for the duration of his
alchemical work. Cecil and the Queen seem to have been somewhat
more impressed by Alneto, perhaps because he had connections in high
places, being especially friendly with Princess Cecilia of Sweden. It is,
however, interesting that they were willing to support an alchemist to
make gold for the state. Had Alneto not turned up at the very time
Charnock was composing his Epistle, perhaps Charnock would have
been given the opportunity of being supported by the Queen. Charnock’s
Epistle was not actually placed in the Queen’s library but remained in
Cecil’s possession, indeed the title page bears his name as owner and it
was through Burghley’s personal papers that Charnock’s manuscript
eventually found its way into the British Library as MS Lansdowne 703.
Perhaps Cecil, supporting the cause of Alneto at the time, did not even
pass Charnock’s Epistle on to the Queen.

Charnock’s Epistle is, I believe, an important social document of the
early Elizabethan period. It shows how seriously alchemy was taken at
the highest levels in English society, and also how a sincere alchemist of
that time tried to find ways to obtain support for his research. It further
reveals how there were, during the period of dissolution of the
monsteries, many former churchmen offering to reveal the secrets of

5