When medieval and early modern England was threatened by currency crisis, the possibility of transmutation became a matter of state. From the fourteenth century, English monarchs and their ministers cracked down on counterfeiting while simultaneously turning to alchemists to help resolve bullion shortages and restore confidence in English coin. A paradox ensued. On the one hand, transmutation—if attainable—offered a solution to England’s currency woes. On the other, false “multiplication” of metal threatened to debase the coinage further. This tension was reflected not only in official responses to alchemy, but in the language adopted by alchemists themselves, who sought to distinguish alchemically-produced gold from the debased metal confected not only by multipliers, but also, increasingly, by the English mint. 
In this paper, I trace some of the consequence of English courtly interest in alchemy, particularly during a relatively understudied period: the reign of Henry VIII. At this time, transmutation was technically illegal in England. Yet, contrary to what we might expect, claims of alchemical expertise did not always land practitioners in trouble—on the contrary, they could offer a lifeline for alchemists being investigated for other crimes. During the 1530s and 40s, men like William Blomfild and Richard Jones emphasized their alchemical skill in petitions to kings and royal councillors, hoping to ameliorate charges of fraud, conjuring, and even treason. I shall argue that such offers resonated among mint officials and royal councillors who sought both to increase private wealth and to stabilize the currency.

In early modern Europe, many princes saw enormous value in supporting natural knowledge at court, regularly supporting experts who could extend the power of the state over nature and sustain the health of the sovereign. In the mid-sixteenth century, however, a disturbing cluster of incidents at several courts in the Holy Roman Empire suggested that expertise with nature was as likely to destabilize princely rule as it was to bolster it. In Gotha, an imperial knight named Grumbach was said to have used a potion in the 1560s to bewitch his patron, convincing him that angels wanted him to mount a military campaign against the Holy Roman Emperor. In Berlin, the elector died unexpectedly in 1571when his (Jewish) Master of the Mint Lippold supposedly gave him poison-laced wine, while in 1575, at the ducal court in Wolfenbüttel, the alchemist Anna Zieglerin reportedly attempted to poison the duchess and to win the duke’s favors with love magic. Although each of these shocking assaults was an isolated event, observers saw a through-line: treacherous courtiers deploying magic, poison, and alchemy to manipulate the affections of—if not kill—their patrons. In this paper, I will examine the implications of these terrifying instances of patronage gone awry for the practice of alchemy in central Europe, arguing that they highlighted the fragility of princely rule and reframed the court alchemist’s knowledge of nature as a potential threat, not a boon, to the body of the sovereign and the early modern state.

The importance and profile of transmutational alchemy in royal and princely courts of the early modern period, particularly in German lands, has been a valuable area of research for some time. Hopeful transmuters, or those with other valuable chymical knowledge, frequently offered themselves and found patronage at such courts, and often enough ending up imprisoned or executed. The French crown, on the other hand, avoided alchemical speculations, and through the seventeenth century, Louis XIV and his ministers positively forbade chrysopoetic endeavors in connection with state activities, such as by members of the crown-sponsored Académie Royale des Sciences. Nevertheless, this situation changed dramatically in the early eighteenth century when several high ministers of state engaged with reputed transmuters, and appear to have had them actively sought out. This paper will detail this remarkable change of heart, its causes and results, by following the histories and activities of several such transmuters and their relations with multiple arms of the French state. It will also offer a portrait of the strangely bifurcated reputation—oscillating between hope and fear—of chymistry and its practitioners in the period, with implications for explaining why chrysopoeia suddenly “went underground” in France in the 1720s.