God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [219]
Lilly made precise observations of the heavens at the precise date, time and place of meetings in the course of the Uxbridge negotiations, and much of the business brought by his clients was topical: ‘by what death [Laud] should die, and when?’; ‘if any design to massacre parliament/if take effect/if near maturity’.23 But the personal and the military intertwined. A question about the outcome of the siege of Pontefract, for example, seems to have been connected to concern about rents due from lands in the area.24 A woman asked ‘if her husband was alive in the wars’; Mrs Poole if ‘her husband be dead or no?’ Other questions were less fraught: Lady Holborne asked ‘if best her husband come to parliament’, an anonymous client ‘if he should obtain what he desired of the committee?’25
Wartime uncertainties impinged on many areas of personal life, and Lilly was clearly meeting a significant demand. His real triumph was in print, however. In Supernaturall sights… seen in London, written the week after Marston Moor and published in August 1644, he made some bold predictions. Called into Somerset Yard, in London, he observed in the sky above London ‘a long yellowish apparition in form and shape almost like to be a serpent’. It appeared over south-west Kent and north-east Surrey and lasted much of the night, in which time it had moved past London and into the Midland counties: that is, probably, to Oxford. Unlike other reports of supernatural phenomena during the 1640s, Lilly’s pamphlet made a claim to a science (actually more an art) of interpretation. Based on precise observation of the location Lilly was able, as with his personal clients, to offer some firm opinions about the trend of events. In this case he claimed that this was a sign of a dissolution of a mischievous plot against the state and commonwealth, ‘A renting in pieces or mutinous disturbance of some Monarchy near at hand’.26 If this rather hedged his bets a predicted eclipse on 21 August foretold of Prince Rupert’s death or ruin. This was, in fact, the first year of the most successful publishing career of the decade.
Lilly’s art was an elaborate but imprecise one. Seventeenth-century astronomy was capable of discerning movement in seven celestial bodies, the sun, the moon and a number of planets of the solar system. These seven bodies seemed to move against an unchanging backdrop, which was divided into the twelve signs of the zodiac. The heavenly bodies, with their predictable movements, were thought to exercise an influence over the much more mutable and unpredictable ‘sublunary’ world, where change and decay were permanent features of existence. Astrology was the science by which these effects could be understood, and the art by which they could, perhaps, be predicted. All sublunary bodies were composed of combinations of the four elements – earth, air, fire and water – and these elements were emitted in different ways by the celestial bodies, effecting changes in the observable natural world. This reflects a common habit of thought in seventeenth-century Europe – seeking out the correspondences and sympathies which linked the various levels of the physical world together.27
Judicial astrology sought to make predictions about these influences – on the health of particular