Page 9 - Charnock alchemical letter

‘Oxford Man’ is so obviously merely a device for asking questions that
this attempt to give him substance seems rather clumsy. He rather gives
the game away a few sentences earlier when he too openly requests that
the Queen should understand that this ‘confabulation’ with the Oxford
man was not feigned but really happened.

Through this dialogue Charnock first outlines his scheme to enlist
the support of the Queen, explaining all the details of the cost and the
profits that will be obtained. Then he feels the need to give support to his
possessing the secret of the stone, by listing those Englishmen who have
known the secret of alchemy before him. He sketches the history of
Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, George Ripley, Thomas Norton and
others. Then provide some verse extracts from his own Breviary of
alchemy, Norton’s Ordinal, Ripley’s Compound of alchemy and a short
piece from Chaucer’s ‘Canon’s Yeoman’s tale’. He even quotes some
texts from the Bible to suggest that alchemy is in line with God’s
purpose.

Finally the ‘Oxford Man’ is sent away and Charnock returns to
directly addressing the Queen. He then asks that her majesty should
study his book and in time arrange for it to be put into print. Sadly, at the
end of the manuscript is a little note on the final folio “To the printer on
the other side”, supposedly a note about how the work should be set up
in print. There is, however, nothing on the reverse of the folio.

He returns to expressing his confidence that he has the perfect
knowledge of how to make the philosophers stone and repeats his offer
to voluntarily accept imprisonment in the Tower of London, so that he
might have the solitude to pursue the alchemical work on her behalf. As
a final flourish he states that the philosophers’ stone has already been
made within her kingdom during the past 100 years and that King Henry
VII, her grandfather at one time possessed it. With that he ends this
incredibly courageous request to the Queen.

Did the Queen take up his offer? It appears not. But she was
interested in alchemy, as a strange series of letters preserved and
documented in the Domestic State Papers, concerning three alchemical
flasks which were bequeathed by an adept, Clement Oldfield, to Queen
Elizabeth I.

Did the Queen even receive the epistle? In MS. Ashmole 1445 we
have the rather sad note of Charnock:

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