England. 1583. Good Queen Bess sits on the throne. Her court and her country are besieged by threats.

Her cousin Mary, pretender to the English throne, rules Scotland, and there is strong, albeit hidden, support for the Catholic Mary to usurp the crown. Secret plots abound.

And word has reached England that Spain, at the time the greatest power in the known world, is assembling a large naval force (The Spanish Armada) in preparation for the invasion of England. (Philip of Spain, like Mary, Queen of Scots, believed he had a legitimate claim to the throne of England because he was the husband of Mary I at the time of her death. There was also a strong religious motivation for fiercely Catholic Spain to conquer Protestant England.)

Queen Elizabeth I and her advisors learn that her enemies are attempting to persuade The Holy Roman Emperor to join their crusade against England. (Rudolf II was the emperor of all the Germanys, the king of Hungary and Croatia, and the archduke of Austria.) They decide they need to send someone to the court of Rudolf in Prague to prevent this alliance.

Who to send? A trusted insider, fully apprised of the details of the operation? No, why not send John Dee, and not tell him anything about anything, and, hey, let’s not ask him to go, instead let’s trick him into it!

John Dee was an astronomer and philosopher who was an occasional advisor to Queen Elizabeth and who, according to the first two books of this series (“The Eyes of the Queen” and “The Queen’s Men”), had previously assisted the crown in sensitive situations. He has been referred to as the original M16 agent. He signed his letters to Elizabeth as 007. (He also coined the phrase “the British Empire”.) His personal library was over three times the size of the libraries of Cambridge and Oxford combined. He really existed, but, by all that is historical, do not google him! (I wish that I had read this book without knowing that he looked like Rasputin.)

Dee was also interested in the occult, in alchemy, and in divination. This was not unusual at the time, when spirituality and magic were considered as legitimate as science as a means to acquire knowledge. Dee sought to contact angels through the use of a crystal gazer. However, the penalty for conjuring evil spirits or conjuring to seek treasure was death, so anyone seeking contact with spirits, even angels, was at risk. For how to prove that you were not attempting to contact the dark side?

Coincidentally, Rudolf II was fascinated with the supernatural and the mystical. Thus QE1 and her advisors were betting that these shared interests would gain Dee an audience.

So. Magic, spies, lies, betrayal, danger, royalty, and a peek into life in Elizabethan England. This book has it all. Although this is historical fiction, the characters portrayed are, for the most part, based on real people. My favorite character is Christopher Marlowe, who arrives in the narrative like a breath of fresh air and whose eccentric personality and surprising actions help propel the pace of the story.

Any fan of historical fiction will like this book. Almost no gore, although a man is racked. Almost no sex, although (gasp) a nipple is caressed. ⭐️⭐️⭐️. Publication date: March 14, 2023.

My thanks to the author, Oliver Clements, to the publisher, Atria Books (an imprint of Simon & Schuster), and to @NetGalley for providing me a copy of this book.

This was another great entry in the Agents of the Crown series, it was what I was expecting from the series. I enjoyed the time-period going on and it had the same spark going on from each entry. Oliver Clements has a great style and it works so well, I was glad I was given the chance to read this and look forward to more from Oliver Clements.

"And they’d watched the man of law bustle down to Throckmorton House, and then scarcely an hour later, just as it was getting dark, a servant had detached himself from the shadows at the rear of the house and set off toward Salisbury Court."