The Alchemical Patronage of Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley

laming betrayal, setbacks and deception, Medley failed to produce a return on their
investment, and was eventually imprisoned.
Historians of the Society have seen it is as the inevitable end of a charlatan, echoing
the assessment of John Strype‘s The Life of the Learned Sir Thomas Smith (1698). 53 Strype‘s
very broad account glossed over many of the project‘s details, and provided no analysis of
its importance. He relied on two letters written by Thomas Smith and William Medley to
Cecil explaining their role in the scheme, both of which omit significant elements of the
project. 54 Because he overlooked the extensive correspondence between these men, Strype
neither grasped the true size and scope of the project, nor the amount of support and
financing it garnered from the Elizabethan Court. Strype also ignored William Medley‘s
biographical background, and assumed that the alchemist met his just ends imprisoned for
debt. 55 As an early enlightenment intellectual Strype struggled to reconcile the intellectual
ability of men like Smith and Cecil with their support for such an irrational scheme. He
concluded that the project‘s main achievement was to teach otherwise wise and admirable
men ―to trust little to words and promises, nor to experiments made afar off, nor to the
accounts of men of that faculty [alchemy]‖. 56 Strype‘s analysis, weighed down with all the
scientific age‘s derision for an age of superstition, depicted the project as an embarrassing
example of the lingering ignorance that pervaded Elizabethan society.
Modern political historians have paid little real attention to the Society of the New
Art and have been largely content to follow Strype in castigating it as a transparent fraud.
Mary Dewar‘s biography of Sir Thomas Smith provides probably the most thorough
examination of the project to date. 57 Using a much wider range of sources than Strype,
Dewar‘s account goes into greater detail, but essentially tells the same story. Her
chronology of events is generally correct, but Dewar ends her account with Medley trying
53 John Strype, The Life of the Learned Sir Thomas Smith.
54 It seems that Strype‘s two sources for his account were: William Medley to William Cecil, 19 April 1572
TNA SP12/86/14; and Thomas Smith to William Cecil, 15 December 1574, Lansdowne Vol. 19, No. 45.
55 Strype, The Life of the Learned Sir Thomas Smith, p. 105.
56 Ibid., p. 105.
57 Mary Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith, London, 1964, pp. 149-55.
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