William Lilly

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William Lilly (1602–1681) was the most prominent English astrologer of the seventeenth century, the author of Christian Astrology — the first major textbook of the art written in English rather than Latin — and the writer of a yearly almanac, Merlinus Anglicus, that sold in tens of thousands across the decades of the English Civil War. He came late and from nowhere to the work: a Leicestershire farmer’s son who arrived in London as a servant, married his employer’s widow, and only in his thirties took up the study of astrology under a succession of practitioners then working in the city.

From Diseworth to Strand Bridge

He was born on the first of May 1602 at Diseworth, in Leicestershire, the son of a yeoman whose holding was slipping out from under him. The boy was bright enough for the grammar school at Ashby-de-la-Zouch and would have gone further had there been money for it; there was not. In 1620 he walked to London and took service in the household of Gilbert Wright, a master of the Salters’ Company who could neither read nor write and kept Lilly partly as a clerk. For seven years he carried coal, swept the yard, and nursed Wright’s first wife through the cancer that killed her in 1624; he survived the plague of 1625 in a city that did not; and when Wright died in 1627 he left his servant a small annuity. Within months Lilly had married Wright’s widow, Ellen, a woman some years his senior who brought with her an estate of around a thousand pounds. The marriage made him, at twenty-five, a gentleman of leisure with nothing in particular to do.

What he did, in 1632, was take up astrology. He learned the casting of figures from a clutch of working London practitioners — the first and most colorful was an itinerant Welsh astrologer named John Evans, whom Lilly left after watching him bend a judgment to flatter a paying client. The method itself was older than any of his teachers. It descended, through Arabic and Latin intermediaries, from the technical apparatus of the Hellenistic and medieval worlds: from Claudius Ptolemy, whose Tetrabiblos remained the philosophical charter of the art; from Julius Firmicus Maternus, the most extensive Latin witness of late antiquity; and from the long line of astrologer-mathematicians of the Abbasid east whose work entered Europe through the twelfth-century translators surveyed under Islamic astrology, alchemy, and astral magic. By Lilly’s day the Hellenistic astrology of Valens and Dorotheus had passed through a thousand years of commentary, correction, and Christian accommodation. He inherited it whole, in the form a working Englishman of the 1630s could buy in a stationer’s shop.

The press falls open

Lilly’s rise tracked the collapse of the censorship that had kept such material in check. The Star Chamber, which had licensed the press and confined astrology to harmless almanac matter, was abolished in 1641; the controls did not hold. When the press fell open in the 1640s, Lilly turned astrology into a public, partisan instrument. His first almanac, Merlinus Anglicus Junior, appeared in April 1644 — the title’s Merlin an English figure of native prophecy, not the enchanter of romance — and he produced one every year for the rest of his life. The almanacs read the heavens for the political moment, and they read them, for the most part, for Parliament. When he forecast the crushing royalist defeat at Naseby in June 1645, and the fall of Colchester three years later, his reputation was made; a favorable judgment from Lilly was reckoned worth more to the parliamentary cause than a regiment in the field.

He was consulted, paid, and at times protected by men on the winning side. The Council of State granted him a sum of money and a pension of a hundred pounds a year; he sat among the spectators at the trial of the King in January 1649. Yet the loyalties were never quite simple. In 1647 and again in 1648 he was consulted by Charles I himself, the man his almanacs worked to ruin, and he is said to have helped procure the saw and acid sent to assist the King’s failed escape from Carisbrooke Castle. Royalist astrologers answered him in print — above all George Wharton, whose counter-almanacs turned the same comets and eclipses to the King’s account, in a paper war that ran alongside the shooting one. Whether Lilly believed his own forecasts or supplied what his patrons wanted is a question his contemporaries already asked, and one the surviving record does not settle. He prospered under every regime in turn: the Long Parliament, the Protectorate of Cromwell, and — having read the wind — the restored monarchy of 1660, before which he made his peace.

Christian Astrology

Christian Astrology, published in 1647 by Thomas Brudenell for the stationers John Partridge and Humphrey Blunden, is the work he is remembered by. It is a substantial folio in three books. The first lays out the raw apparatus — the signs and houses, the planets and their dignities, the construction and basic reading of a figure — in plain, teachable English. The second, by far the largest, is devoted to horary astrology — the branch in which a figure is cast not for a birth but for the exact moment a question is put, and read for its answer. This was the engine of Lilly’s consulting room. A client arrived with a worry; the astrologer noted the hour, erected the chart, and judged it. Lilly organized the second book the way the practice itself ran, house by house through the twelve domains of a life: the first house for the querent’s own body, the second for money, the seventh for marriage and open enemies, the eighth for death and legacies, the twelfth for secret sorrows. Each house gathered the questions that fell to it — whether a marriage should go forward, whether lost goods would be recovered, whether an absent ship or an absent husband still lived, whether a sickness would turn — and Lilly set out which significators to weigh and how a sound judgment was reached. The third book treats nativities, the reading of a birth-chart for the shape and turning-points of a whole life. Across the volume he worked through real example figures, many drawn from his own practice and reproduced with the question, the moment, and the outcome, so that the reader learned the art by watching it done rather than by rule alone. That, more than any doctrine, is why the book endured as a reference for practitioners long after its author was gone, and why the horary tradition in English still circles back to it as its foundation.

The title’s adjective was the wager of the book. Lilly did not call his manual plain Astrology; he called it Christian Astrology, and the choice was deliberate at a moment when many divines held the art to be at best vain curiosity and at worst commerce with the diabolical. He presented the casting of figures as a reading of providence rather than a rival to it — the stars as instruments through which a Christian God governed the sublunary world, legible to the diligent and pious astrologer, binding nothing that prayer and prudence could not turn. The frame let him answer the standard theological charge, that to read the future was to deny God’s freedom or man’s, by insisting that the heavens inclined but did not compel. It was the same defense Ptolemy had mounted against the ancient skeptics, recast for a Protestant century.

Merlin and the burning city

He is bound, in popular memory, to the Great Fire of London. In 1651 he published Monarchy or No Monarchy in England, a tract arguing that England would not again be ruled by a king, and appended to it sixteen emblems he called hieroglyphical — coded pictures meant to disclose the nation’s future across many years. Two of them were read, after the fact, as plain prophecy: one showed a great city in flames beside a river, and another a pair of twins falling into fire, Gemini being the sign under which London was held to be born. When the city burned in September 1666, the emblems of 1651 suddenly looked like foreknowledge. On the twenty-fifth of October that year Lilly was summoned before the Commons committee investigating the fire, to explain whether he had known of it in advance — or helped bring it about. He told them he had set down the figures fifteen years before without knowing the year, and he was dismissed without charge. The episode captures the ambiguous standing such figures held: taken seriously enough to be questioned by the state, not seriously enough to be believed.

The decades after the Restoration narrowed his world. He had already learned the cost of speaking too plainly: in 1652 a passage critical of Parliament put him in custody for the better part of a fortnight, and the Restoration of 1660 brought a season of suspicion in which the parliamentary astrologer had to account for himself before he was let alone. More slowly, the ground itself was shifting. The new natural philosophy gathered in the Royal Society, chartered in 1662, was hardening against judicial astrology as a method; the universities that had once read the heavens alongside medicine were closing the subject out of respectable learning. Astrology and physic had grown up entwined — the diagnosis of disease by the heavens was old when Paracelsus remade medicine on an astral and alchemical pattern a century before — and Lilly followed that joint into his retirement. He withdrew to Hersham, near Walton-on-Thames in Surrey, where in 1670 he obtained a license to practice physic and spent his last years as a country doctor who still read the occasional figure. He trained an apprentice, Henry Coley, to carry the almanac forward under the old name, and near the end he wrote — at the urging of his friend and patron Elias Ashmole, the antiquary and collector whose own cabinet would seed the Ashmolean — a candid account of his own life and of the astrologers of his age. He died at Hersham on the ninth of June 1681; Ashmole, his literary executor in all but name, saw the memoir into print long after.

Textual afterlife and the scholarship

Christian Astrology itself never went entirely silent. The original 1647 folio (with a second edition of 1659) entered the public domain centuries ago, and the cleanest surviving witness is the octavo digitized by the Wellcome Library. In the nineteenth century the work was put back into circulation in mutilated form: the astrologer Richard James Morrison, writing as “Zadkiel,” issued An Introduction to Astrology by William Lilly (1835; expanded Bohn edition 1852), an abridgement that cut the horary corpus hard and modernized the diction to suit a Victorian readership — the version that long stood in for Lilly in print and is still the text hosted at sacred-texts.com. The unabridged 1647 text was not restored to general availability until the facsimile revival of the later twentieth century, which fed directly into the contemporary horary schools that take Lilly as their master.

The serious historical study of Lilly belongs to the last two generations of scholarship on early-modern English astrology and divination. Patrick Curry’s Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England (Princeton University Press, 1989) overturned the old assumption that the art simply withered after 1650, reconstructing instead a contested public discipline with practitioners, clients, and critics locked in a struggle over who could speak for the heavens. Ann Geneva’s Astrology and the Seventeenth Century Mind: William Lilly and the Language of the Stars (Manchester University Press, 1995; cataloged at the Wellcome Collection) treats Lilly as the period’s premier practitioner and reads his comets, eclipses, and great conjunctions as a working symbolic language rather than a failed proto-science. The almanac trade that carried his name is anatomized in Bernard Capp’s Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500–1800 (Faber, 1979), and the wider place of the art in English belief in Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). The bibliographical spine of all of this — the editions of Lilly, Wharton, and their fellows — is gathered in the standard biographical entry in the Dictionary of National Biography and in the holdings indexed by the Online Books Page.

The English close of an old art

Lilly belongs to a tradition far older than himself, and he stands at its English close. The astrology he practiced was the last full flowering in English of the Hellenistic-medieval apparatus that runs from the Mediterranean through the Arabic and Latin transmission into the Renaissance technical canon — the same current that produced Cecco d’Ascoli, burned at Florence three centuries before, and that shaped the work of the Renaissance astro-magic generation: John Dee, Robert Fludd, and the providential prophecy of Nostradamus. What Lilly added to it was not new doctrine but a new audience. He took an art that had been the property of court mathematicians and Latin-reading clerics and put it, in English, into the hands of any literate tradesman who could read a figure — and in doing so made it, for one volatile generation, an instrument of public power.

The Christian adjective in his title was a claim staked against the coming weather, and it did not hold. The God whose providence Lilly read in the planets, the King he both served and undermined, the Parliament that pensioned and then imprisoned him — each demanded that the heavens speak unambiguously, for one side. The art’s gift was that it never quite did, and that ambiguity, which had let Lilly trim and prosper across four regimes, was exactly what the new philosophy could not forgive it. He had built a livelihood on the sublunary middle ground between fate and free will, the place where the stars incline and a prudent man decides — and he held that ground, in print and in person, longer than any English astrologer before or since.

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