Person

Medley, William

English lawyer and an alchemist; along with Medley’s training in law, at some point he developed an expertise in metallurgy - exceptionally rare among Elizabethan Englishmen; born into a wealthy Essex family, probably in the mid 1540s; his family, the Medleys of Tilty Abbey, Essex, had strong links to many noble families, including William Cecil’s; author of: A brief discourse on rhetorick, (a single manuscript), found among the papers of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, Queen Elizabeth I’s chief advisor, to whom the treatise is dedicated; the manuscript is identified as: Cecil Papers MS 238/6, fol. 1, Hatfield House; Medley, who came from a legal background, is fairly well-known as an alchemist who tried to produce gold for Cecil. Ben Jonson’s play The Alchemist (1616) is partly based on his career)