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By Root 1280 0

human bodies, on the weather and the fate of nations. There were four main areas of such predictions. General predictions, based on the movements of the heavens, related to effects on whole nations – the weather, the state of the crops, mortality and epidemics, war and politics. More immediate and personal predictions were possible in a number of ways. Nativities might enable predictions about the fate of individuals, based on a map of the heavens at the time of their birth. Elections offered advice about when best to undertake a particular project or action, in the light of the state of the heavens. Finally, astrologers might answer a particular question based on the exact time at which it was put to them – horary questions. This final category was very appealing to individuals, of course, and in dealing with horary questions astrologers gave advice about health, love and misfortune, including the likely identity of thieves and so forth. Its claims were considerable: ‘Astrology is more certain than physic, for it reasons from the cause to the effect’.28

Although astrology was a practice of very long standing, with an impressive technical literature and complex procedures, it was inevitably imprecise. Even if the heavens were mapped very precisely for any particular prediction, each planet and each sign had many different qualities. In interpreting the effects of the heavens on any particular sublunary body or enterprise, the astrologer had resort to elaborate rules of interpretation and accumulated practice, but in the last resort every reading depended on judgement, with the result that the more precise the prediction ‘the less likely it was to command unanimous assent’.29 The result was that astrologers in general, and some in particular, acquired a reputation for quackery, and they were armed with a battery of excuses, but they amounted to the same thing: as John Booker put it, ‘I confess that many superstitious and gross absurdities are practiced by the ignorant under colour of this most excellent art but this must not be charged on the art, but the artist’.30

Lilly was accused of quackery by many contemporaries, and he himself said that he had trained in seven weeks and that his move to London had been made for commercial reasons. Sceptical modern historians have also pointed to the commercially significant marriages that Lilly made. But Lilly also claimed that he worked for twelve, fifteen or eighteen hours a day, and his notebooks suggest that this may have been true.31 If the role of individual judgement invited accusations of quackery, it also made for the development of particular reputations: Lilly, for example, was clearly the parliamentary astrologer. We know that he had been sympathetic to the London crowds in 1640–42.32 He was persistently supportive of the parliamentary cause, during the 1640s, but was also a monarchist sceptical perhaps of Charles I as a king, sympathetic to him as an individual and very willing to predict the downfall of Prince Rupert. Part of his phenomenal success depended on what appeared to be an accurate prediction of the great parliamentary victory at Naseby in 1645.33 This was an immediate contrast with George Wharton, who had emerged as the royalist competition but made a notoriously inaccurate prediction about the same royal march in 1645. He was ridiculed by Booker for his poor Latin and his partial prediction, advising Wharton to get his ‘fellow liar Aulicus to English it [translate it] and then give your judgement upon another march’.34 Even as it offered certainties, astrology was politicized and its authority undermined.

Lilly did not normally make his own observations, and Supernaturall sights is in that sense unusual. Much of his published work took the form of almanacs, making general predictions for the year. But in publishing with as much success as he did, Lilly changed the market for astrology. These were English astrology’s halcyon days.35 The long tradition in which Lilly stood had enjoyed currency in aristocratic and royal circles since the fifteenth century