Page 45 - Charnock alchemical letter

great philosopher and his master when he was a boy showed him a
wonderful secret, while his work was a working for he opened his
principal glass and showed him the philosophers’ black stone, and when
he died he left him his work, who kept it forward all the time of his long
life, and wrought it as aurum potable for medicine, for the ministration of
physick. Which did help Innocent Bishop of Rome of an incurable
disease, by the virtue of the philosophers’ stone, these ways wrought.

The Oxford Man

Now I will trouble you no longer in these questions, without you will of
yourself, but pass for this, to some things else.

Master Charnock

Be it even so. And now last of all in this our time there flourished an
excellent philosopher in Allemagne under Charles the Emperor who for
his works will never be oblived [forgotten], they contain such high and
profound learning, to the hiding of the philosophers’ stone. I mean that
man of worthy fame Cornelius Agrippa21, whom the Emperor’s majesty
did prefer to high dignity for to attend upon his royal majesty, and that he
should show himself once in three days in his court, who had the
philosophers’ stone, and Charles the Emperor suffered him to work it to
his own commodity and profit what he could, either to medicine as
aurum potable or unto metal as unto pure gold, for he desired as much or
more, the royalty of the thing, than he did the yearly value of gold, which
it would yield: saving that which should be kept, maintained, and
wrought, as aurum potable for the preservation of his majesty’s royal
life, in health.

And so in old times, Emperors, kings, and princes desired this science,
more for a royalty of the thing, than wholly for the desire of gold, and
they did maintain noble and learned philosophers for that purpose, and
looked for nothing at their hands but only their medicine to use it as a
preserver of life and health. And so I trust the Queen majesty will
conceive of it, that it shall be as much for a royalty to her highness to
have the thing perfectly wrought within her realm as the commodity of
the gold which will come of it, beside the stone which I will dd. [give]
her majesty according to my former promise, for the preserving of her
grace’s royal life, in health. For above all the rich cordials in the
apothecary’s shop in the extremities of sickness, or danger of death this

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