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By Root 1408 0

at least. What was really remarkable about Lilly was his commercial success and the related claim that he democratized astrology. Earlier in 1644 he had published the first of a phenomenally successful series, Merlinus Anglicus Junior. It sold out in a week and the print runs in subsequent years were phenomenal: 13,500 in 1646, 17,000 in 1647 and 18,500 in 1648. His success was sustained throughout the following decade and in 1659, it was said, he was selling 30,000 copies. This was very big business, even at 2d per copy for cheap editions, and in a population of 5 million, with a relatively low literacy rate, this represents an amazing market penetration.36

Political astrology: George Wharton’s notoriously inaccurate prediction in May 1645

Although Lilly was the most successful astrologer of the 1640s, he was by no means alone. He and Wharton enjoyed good sales and their contemporary, John Booker, while less successful in print, had around 1,000 private consultations per year from 1648 to 1665.37 Lilly led the way in making astrology available to a wider market and was the most successful of a golden generation of astrologers. He also made another very distinctive contribution. In 1647 he published the methods of judicial astrology, in the first substantial English language text book, Christian astrology. It has been in use ever since. According to Lilly, the stars are divine signs, not physical causes, a position which allowed him to square astrology with Christianity, and explain failures: ‘we predict nothing but with this limitation, the hand of the Almighty God considered or not impediting or preventing nature, for in his alone breast is all learning, science, knowledge, power and dominion’.38

Lilly also published prophecies, which offered similar reassurances; indeed, many of his early titles gesture towards prophecy, or Merlin. A prophecy of Merlin had circulated with approval among Covenanting soldiers in 1640, and it is not hard to see the attraction of prophecy in wartime. Prophecy was potentially subversive since it was so obviously political, and in more normal times was regarded with considerable suspicion, but in the 1640s the brakes were off. Mother Shipton was said to be a contemporary of Cardinal Wolsey’s and her prophecies date from long before the war, but her career took off in 1641. It was then that her prophecies were first published, and they were published at least nineteen more times by 1700.39 There was a minor publishing war, with escalating numbers of ancient prophecies set out for the public. Lilly also dealt with Supernaturall sights and apparitions, and these too continued to get aired in print. But astrology offered a more consistent set of observations, with stricter rules of interpretation – it was continuous and more systematic about interpretation, and, crucially, offered predictions, for both individuals and nations.

Lilly’s success bears testimony both to the power of print and to the anxieties which the political crisis had fostered. Almanac sales, the flood of private consultations and the appetite to understand the method speak of a massive public appetite for certainty; some firm basis on which to judge what the future might hold. In Merlinus Anglicus Junior (1644) Lilly had gestured at this source of appeal in his predictions: Mercury ‘the father of lies and untruths, and scandalous pamphlets’ would be in a common sign during the coming year, ‘as if he intended all this whole year to vex us with flying reports, continual fears, false alarums, untoward speeches, contradictory news, lying messengers, and cozening Accomptants, Receivers, Treasurers, and the like’.40 But judicial astrology was an inexact and (in the 1640s, at least) partisan science. Uncertainty arose not just from the complexity of current events, but from the morass of conflicting claims in print about what it all meant, and that was an invitation to others to go to press with their certainties. But that was a source of further uncertainty. Print was a symptom, a cause and an opportunity; and it fed off itself.