Chapter V.

       The Last of the English Magicians: William Lilly

       Table of Contents

      ‘Lilly was a prominent, and, in the opinion of many of his contemporaries, a very important personage in the most eventful period of English history. He was a principal actor in the farcical scenes which diversified the bloody tragedy of civil war; and while the King and the Parliament were striving for mastery in the field, he was deciding their destinies in the closet. The weak and the credulous of both parties who sought to be instructed in “destiny’s dark counsels,” flocked to consult the “wily Archimagus,” who, with exemplary impartiality, meted out victory and good fortune to his clients, according to the extent of their faith and the weight of their purses. A few profane Cavaliers might make his name the burthen of their malignant rhymes—a few of the more scrupulous among the saints might keep aloof in sanctified abhorrence of the “Stygian sophister”—but the great majority of the people lent a willing and reverential ear to his prophecies and prognostications. Nothing was too high or too low, too mighty or too insignificant, for the grasp of his genius. The stars, his informants, were as communicative on the most trivial as on the most important subjects. If a scheme was set on foot to rescue the King, or to retrieve a stray trinket; to restore the royal authority, or to make a frail damsel an honest woman; to cure the nation of anarchy, or a lap-dog of a surfeit—William Lilly was the oracle to be consulted. His almanacks were spelled over in the tavern, and quoted in the Senate; they nerved the arm of the soldier, and rounded the period of the orator. The fashionable beauty, dashing along in her calash from St. James’s or the Mall, and the prim starched dame from Watling Street or Bucklersbury, with a staid foot-boy, in a plush jerkin, plodding behind her—the reigning toast among “the men of wit about town,” and the leading groaner in a tabernacle concert—glided alternately into the study of the trusty wizard, and poured into his attentive ear strange tales of love, or trade, or treason. The Roundhead stalked in at one door, whilst the Cavalier was hurried out at the other.

      ‘The confessions of a man so variously consulted and trusted, if written with the candour of a Cardan or a Rousseau, would indeed be invaluable. The “Memoirs of William Lilly,” though deficient in this particular, yet contain a variety of curious and interesting anecdotes of himself and his contemporaries, which, when the vanity of the writer or the truth of his art is not concerned, may be received with implicit credence.

      ‘The simplicity and apparent candour of his narrative might induce a hasty reader of this book to believe him a well-meaning but somewhat silly personage, the dupe of his own speculations—the deceiver of himself as well as of others. But an attentive examination of the events of his life, even as recorded by himself, will not warrant so favourable an interpretation. His systematic and successful attention to his own interest, his dexterity in keeping on “the windy side of the law,” his perfect political pliability, and his presence of mind and fertility of resources when entangled in difficulties, indicate an accomplished impostor, not a crazy enthusiast. It is very possible and probable that, at the outset of his career, he was a real believer in the truth and lawfulness of his art, and that he afterwards felt no inclination to part with so pleasant and so profitable a delusion.... Of his success in deception, the present narrative exhibits abundant proofs. The number of his dupes was not confined to the vulgar and illiterate, but included individuals of real worth and learning, of hostile parties and sects, who courted his acquaintance and respected his predictions. His proceedings were deemed of sufficient importance to be twice made the subject of a Parliamentary inquiry; and even after the Restoration—when a little more scepticism, if not more wisdom, might have been expected—we find him examined by a Committee of the House of Commons respecting his foreknowledge of the Great Fire of London. We know not whether it “should more move our anger or our mirth” to see our assemblage of British Senators—the contemporaries of Hampden and Falkland, of Milton and Clarendon, in an age which moved into action so many and such mighty energies—gravely engaged in ascertaining the cause of a great national calamity from the prescience of a knavish fortune-teller, and puzzling their wisdoms to interpret the symbolical flames which blazed in the misshapen woodcuts of his oracular publications.

      ‘As a set-off against these honours may be mentioned the virulent and unceasing attacks of almost all the party scribblers of the day; but their abuse he shared in common with men whose talents and virtues have outlived the malice of their contemporaries.’—Retrospective Review.

      William Lilly was born at Diseworth, in Leicestershire, on May 1, 1602. He came of an old and reputable family of the yeoman class, and his father was at one time a man of substance, though, from causes unexplained, he fell into a state of great impoverishment. William from the first was intended to be a scholar, and at the age of eleven was sent to the grammar-school at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, where he made a fair progress in his classical studies. In his sixteenth year he began to be much troubled in his dreams regarding his chances of future salvation, and felt a large concern for the spiritual welfare of his parents. He frequently spent the night in weeping and praying, and in an agony of fear lest his sins should offend God. That in this exhibition of early piety he was already preparing for his career of self-hypocrisy and deception, I will not be censorious enough to assert; but in after-life his conscience was certainly much less sensitive, and he ceased to trouble himself about the souls of any of his kith and kin.

      He was about eighteen when the collapse of his father’s circumstances compelled him to leave school. He had used his time and opportunities so well that he had gained the highest form, and the highest place on that form. He spoke Latin as readily as his native tongue; could improvise verses upon any theme—all kinds of verses, hexameter, pentameter, phalenciac, iambic, sapphic—so that if any ingenious youth came from remote schools to hold public disputations, Lilly was always selected as the Ashby-de-la-Zouch champion, and in that