[In this excerpt, Parker discusses the views of Elizabethan society on the nature and uses of astrology.]

Were the stars only made to light
Robbers and Burglarers by night?
To wait on Drunkards, Thieves, Gold-finders,
And Lovers solacing behind doors,
Or giving one another Pledges
Of matrimony under Hedges?
[Hudibras (II, II:817)]

It is difficult for a twentieth-century reader to understand the true position of an astrologer in sixteenth- or seventeenth-century society. We are so conditioned to the present popular reputation of astrology—founded on the Sun-sign newspaper columns which originated in the 1920s—that it is the common impression that astrology is too simple a system to have been taken seriously by an intelligent person for any historical period.

This is no place for an analysis of the niceties of that system; it need only be said, briefly, that the astrologers founded their attempts at character delineation and forecasting on much more complex and scientific considerations than the simple one of what astrological sign the Sun occupied when a man or woman was born. Their system entailed the calculation of the precise position of all the planets in all the signs at the moment and for the place of birth; unless he was born in the same room and within four minutes of another person, no single man could have a birth-chart identical with that of any other person ever born.

When the planetary positions had been calculated, the symbols representing the planets were placed in a birth-chart (or 'figure', or 'scheme', as the Elizabethan astrologers called it); and consideration of their relative positions and the angles they made with each other, and would make in the future as they changed position, enabled the astrologer to reach his conclusions. There were other factors to be taken into consideration also: the planets' positions within the Zodiacal signs and houses, for instance; and there was a sufficiently large number of possibilities (the critic would say) to enable the astrologer to produce evidence to support almost any prediction or contention he might make.

All the same, the system was a strict one, based on an empirical collection of information built up over at least four thousand years, with written evidence of astrological techniques from 500 onwards. There are now many books spelling out in detail the manner of calculation and interpretation of a birth-chart, which differs very little from the manner employed by Ptolemy, Petosiris or Nechepso of Egypt during the three hundred years before the birth of Christ; indeed, the documented history of the technique of astrology is as fascinating as the history of its effect on the social and political life of man. But we need not concern ourselves with it here.

What is important is to understand the climate of opinion about astrology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries…. It is an area neglected by historians; until Dr. A. L. Rowse's recent examinations of the papers of Simon Forman, an Elizabethan astrologer more or less in [William] Lilly's own class, no serious historian had given much attention to astrology and astrologers—even to John Dee, one of the most truly remarkable men of the Elizabethan age—despite the fact that they had had a very considerable influence on their time.

It is difficult for a non-historian to speak authoritatively of this influence; but there is one source from which any intelligent reader can see quite clearly the average Elizabethan's attitude to the subject—the works of Shakespeare.

One does not need to be warned of the dangers of attributing to Shakespeare the opinions he gives his characters. On the other hand, there are certain conclusions to be drawn from the many astrological allusions in the plays and poems; and from them one can build up a picture of how the Elizabethan man-in-the-street (for Shakespeare, genius though he was, was also that) regarded the influence of the planets on terrestrial affairs.

The first thing to be said is that in general the Elizabethans accepted that influence as natural, and not seriously to be questioned. Shakespeare himself undoubtedly shared that view, and moreover makes it quite clear that it was not the silly view of the modern reader of the astrological columns in the newspapers, or indeed of many unthinking twentieth-century 'believers' in astrology. The position is very different, incidentally, for Lilly's great contemporary Milton, who was obviously totally uninterested in astrology. He only used astrological symbolism very sparingly in his work, though he knew enough about the subject to make an occasional pun, or an occasional semi-technical allusion:

Among the constellations war were sprung,
Two planets rushing from aspect malign
Of fiercest opposition in mid sky…
[Paradise Lost, VI: 313]

In Sonnet 14 (and in the sonnets he was surely speaking from his own heart) Shakespeare wrote:

Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck,
And yet methinks I have astronomy;
But not to tell of good or evil luck,
Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons' quality;
Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,
Pointing to each his thunder, rain, and wind
Or say with princes if it shall go well
By oft predict that I in heaven find…

Although he was aware of the value of astrology ('astronomy' and 'astrology' were often synonyms), the Elizabethan was not given to relying on 'the stars' (by which the planets were meant; the stars of course have nothing to do with astrology) for his decisions, much less to bring him good or bad luck, or to forecast plagues or famines or even the weather—though some work on astrological weatherforecasting had been going on for a thousand years or more. He did not see astrology as a means of 'fortunetelling' which could tell a man when his personal 'weather' would be good, bad or indifferent; nor was he interested in using the science (for so it was regarded) to tell great princes whether they would win battles.

That is what the Elizabethan did not feel about astrology. What, then, was it good for? There are various hints. In Julius Caesar, for instance, in a passage which has been much misunderstood, Cassius tells Brutus that

Men at some time are masters of their fates.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

That is, there are particular moments of time when men are best able to grasp the opportunities life gives them—are best able to be 'masters of their fates'. They should be careful to note these times (which any competent astrologer could tell them), and taking them at the flood, go on to fortune. In other words, if a man remained an 'underling', it was not because he was forced to do so by the planetary positions, the influence of 'the stars', but because he did not seize the moment when the planetary positions were most propitious for him.

The intelligent Elizabethan believed in such propitious moments, and was often careful to time his important affairs to chime in with them, as Prospero does in The Tempest, nothing that the planets at the time of his enemies' wreck are most favourably placed for the accomplishment of his revenge:

and by my prescience
I find my zenith doth depend upon

A most auspicious star, whose influence
If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes
Will ever after droop.

The history of this belief is long, going back at least to the time of the rise of Assyria, and even earlier. But that it was, during the sixteenth century, both general and firmly held can scarcely be questioned. Almost any contemporary author will confirm it. Raleigh, for instance, in his History of the World, speaks for his contemporaries in a noble passage which clearly shows how rash and foolish he would have considered anyone stupid enough to deny the astrological theory:

And if we cannot deny but that God hath given virtues to spring and fountain, to cold earth, to plants and stones, minerals, and to the excremental parts of the basest living creatures, why should we rob the beautiful stars of their working powers? For, seeing they are many in number and of eminent beauty and magnitude, we may not think that in the treasury of his wisdom who is infinite, there can be wanting, even for every star, a peculiar virtue and operation; as every herb plant fruit and flower adorning the face of the earth hath the like. For as these were not created to beautify the earth alone and to cover and shadow her dusty face but otherwise for the use of man and beast to feed them and cure them; so were not those uncountable glorious bodies set in the firmaments to no other end than to adorn it but for instruments and organs of his divine providence, so far as it hath pleased his just will to determine?

Shakespeare, similarly, saw that 'men as plants increase / Cheered and checked even by the self-same sky', and his belief found expression again and again in his work, when he wished to comment on the governing forces that inclined men's lives this way or that. And in Sonnet 60, at a moment of pessimism:

Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned,
Crooked eclipses' gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.

Time, that is, having given certain propitious planetary attributes at the moment of birth, is later apt to confound them by the planets' progressions.

The fact that there are so many allusions in the plays (apart from glancing references, there are for instance eight specific astrological references in A Winter's Tale, six in I Henry VI, five in the sonnets, five in King Lear) demonstrates not only Shakespeare's recognition of astrology as an everyday influence on life, but the fact that the meanest member of his audience would understand his references. These can even, at times, be moderately technical: when, in Twelfth Night, Sir Toby says to Sir Andrew, 'Were we not born under Taurus?' Sir Andrew replies, 'Taurus; that's sides and heart.' 'No, Sir,' replies Toby, 'it is legs and thighs.' And the point of the exchange (lost to modern audiences) is that they are both wrong, and that the Elizabethan audience would recognize the fact. A few lines later on, Sir Andrew underlines the effect by launching into a gobble-de-gook semi-astrological reference: 'In sooth, thou wast in very gracious fooling last night, when thou spok'st of Pigrogromitus, of the Vapians passing the Equinoctial of Quebus.' (Shakespeare was by no means averse to sending up the over-serious astrological apologist, as when Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice claims that 'it was not for nothing that my nose fell ableeding on Black Monday last at six o'clock i' th' morning, falling out that year on Ash Wednesday was four i' th' afternoon'.)

Astrology was a useful dramatic device (a point, again, lost by modern critics). The long speech of Edmund's in King Lear, often quoted as 'Shakespeare's attack on astrology', is a case in point. Gloucester, it will be remembered, discovering that Edgar has apparently betrayed him, blames this and other discords in the state on 'these late eclipses in the sun and moon'. When he has left the stage, Edmund, the villain, laughs and launches into the beautifully poised, cynical speech about

the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.

'An admirable evasion of whoremaster man,' he continues, 'to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star.'

My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon's Tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut! I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing … Oh, these eclipses do portend these divisions. Fa, sol, la, mi!

The Elizabethan audience will have heard that speech with the increasing realization that Edmund was not to be trusted. How could one rely on the judgment, even the sanity, of a man who argued so against the natural state of things, the self-evident disposition of man under the planets? Instantly, the effect Shakespeare wanted—the establishment of Edmund's perversity—was achieved; and he reinforced it by inserting the high-flown allusions to the Dragon's Tail and Ursa Major, and by having Edmund, within a few lines, demonstrate his duplicity by turning about and taking the opposite view in conversation with Edgar, pretending to mirror Gloucester's attitudes.

Elsewhere in Lear, Shakespeare uses astrology respectfully, as when he makes Kent (wondering that Lear should have had three daughters so disparate in character as Goneril, Regan and Cordelia) say:

It is the stars,
The stars above us govern our conditions;
Else one self mate and make could not beget
Such different issue.

The differing planetary conditions at the time of their birth gave the three daughters their personalities, not the coupling of Lear and his wife.

Time and time again, in play after play, we find serious allusions to astrological forces as naturally exerting an influence on man; the Duke in Measure for Measure, the repository of all wisdom, tells Claudio, condemned, to 'be absolute for death', for he is merely

a breath
Servile to all the skyey influences
That dost this habitation where thou keep'st
Hourly afflict.

Yet if man must learn to accept with resignation certain astrological influences, there are others against which he can and must fight. Cassius pointed this out to Brutus, and Helena (a physician's daughter, and all physicians had some astrological training) says in All's Well that Ends Well:

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven. The fated sky
Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.

Historians have consistently understated the fact that astrology was one of the very few generally recognized universal laws during the Elizabethan age. The astrological theory fitted soundly into the Elizabethan's general conception of the universe, with its great emphasis on order—an emphasis which stressed, certainly, the necessity for order within the State, an inflexible social order; but which reached out beyond man's life, or rather through it, to the easily discernible order within the observable universe: the order of the moving planets and the fixed stars, impressive by the fact that it seemed to regulate what otherwise would easily become a chaos, but also because it provided a paradigm by which man could learn about his place in the natural, universal order of things.

Raleigh emphasized this in his History of the World, and the idea appears again and again (implicitly as well as explicitly) in other Elizabethan literature. But Shakespeare puts it most memorably in Ulysses' great speech in Troilus and Cressida:

The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre,
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office, and custom, in all line of order:
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthron'd and spher'd
Amidst the other; whose med'cinable eye
Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,
And posts, like the commandment of a king,
Sans check, to good and bad: but when the planets
In evil mixture, to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents! what mutiny!
What raging of the sea! shaking of earth!
Commotion in the winds! frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixture!

The passage shows more vividly than any other easily accessible quotation the Elizabethan vision of a parallel system of heavenly and earthly order, and more important from our immediate point of view, of the palpable connection between them.

Astrology had too long been regarded as an immutable law for any but the strongest mind to ignore the fact. It would have taken as much single-minded courage for an Elizabethan positively to deny the planets their effect on man's life as for an early Victorian to deny God his influence.

The educated Elizabethan knew of the continuity of the astrological theory and its effect: of its general use in Babylonia and Egypt, and through the classics of its influence in Greece and, much more extensively, in Rome. In England, within the two hundred years before William Lilly's birth, an interest in the subject had been particular as well as general: Chaucer, whatever his own views on the subject, showed in the Canterbury Tales the popular view—the habit of most people of acting in accordance with the positions of the planets, if they knew them. The Knight's Tale shows characters acting in careful accordance with the astrological qualities of the separate hours of the day; the Wife of Bath excuses her lust by explaining how it was impressed upon her, or at least encouraged in her, by the positions of the planets at the time of her birth.

During the Renaissance, art and science continually made use of astrology and encouraged its study overtly as well as obliquely. It should be remembered that astronomers were invariably, until after Newton, also astrologers; and that the general desire for more and more accurate horoscopes was at least in part responsible for more accurate astronomical observation. Many astronomers began to suspect that astrological theory could not be as simplistic as unscientific people believed; but very few of them, even after a lifetime's study, concluded that the planets had no effect on terrestrial matters.

Tycho de Brahe, for instance, found himself (like Kepler, some years later) forced to become a court astrologer in order to maintain himself; he cast horoscopes for his patrons and their friends, and evidently did so with his tongue somewhat in his cheek, seeing the work of conventional social astrologers as quackery. But he remained until his death utterly convinced that the planets did influence man's personality and destiny, though the existing astrological techniques failed to reveal how.

England produced no really notable theoretical astrologer during the sixteenth century; but a great many distinguished men practised astrology, some of them to political effect. Perhaps the most notable of these was John Dee, still known popularly as 'Queen Elizabeth's astrologer'. This is perhaps to give the astrological side of his work and personality too much importance, though there is some foundation for such a claim. One cannot, however, underestimate the interest of his character; he was a most remarkable man, and his influence on his contemporaries was enormous. He had befriended Elizabeth while she was still a prisoner at Woodstock, and when she found herself Queen, she engaged him to calculate a propitious date for her coronation. There was a period during her reign when she called on Dee almost every day; for years she asked from time to time for advice on specific events or people, inviting him to cast horoscopes for men she wished to trust or perhaps tended to suspect, to suggest cures for her toothache, to explain the significance of a comet, or to discuss the rumours that she was threatened by witchcraft.

Elizabeth was evidently not temperamentally hostile to astrology: in a letter to Mary Stuart in 1588 she rebuked Mary for her changeability, writing: 'if it were not that I consider that by nature we are composed of earthly elements and governed by heavenly, and that I am not ignorant that our dispositions are caused in part by supernatural signs, which change every day, I could not believe that in so short a time such a change could take place.'

What astrologers tend to forget, in rightly claiming Dee as the foremost prognosticator of his time, is that ironically he was responsible to some degree, and despite himself, for the beginning of the desuetude of astrology. The rumours of sorcery and witchcraft that had first attached themselves to him during his Cambridge days persisted, and were used by his enemies. Shortly after Elizabeth's accession, Bishop Jewell preached a sermon before her which was obviously to some extent directed against Dee and others who showed an interest in witchcraft:

It may please Your Grace to understand that this kind of people, within these last few years, are marvellously increased within your realm. These eyes have seen most evident and manifest marks of their wickedness. Your Grace's subjects pine away, even unto death, their colour fadeth, their flesh rotted, their speech is benumbed, their senses are bereft. Wherefore your poor subjects' most humble petition unto Your Highness is that the laws touching such malefactors be put into execution.

During Dee's own lifetime he was vehemently attacked by John Foxe, in his widely disseminated Actes and Monuments. In the 1563 edition, later ordered to be placed in every cathedral church, and displayed too in many parish churches, Foxe referred to 'Dr. Dee the great Conjurer' as 'a caller of Divils'. Dee complained at this 'damnable sklaunder', and in 1576 issued a plea that Foxe should be refrained from calling him, among other things, 'the Arche Conjurer of England'. The plea evidently succeeded, for all references to him were cut out of the 1576 edition; but the damage was done. From then until our own day, Dee has been widely regarded as a 'magician' and sorcerer, and historians have until very recently dismissed him as 'extremely credulous, extravagantly vain, and a most deluded enthusiast' (to quote Biographica Britannica). If the most intelligent of Elizabethan astrologers could be dismissed in that way, what hope was there for the rest? And Dr. Dee was the exception; most of them were far less intelligent than he, and were concerned mainly in acting as consultant psychologists to a wide variety of people—making astrology work for the ordinary man in the street, in the way in which Lilly was to use it. One such, certainly the best known, was Simon Forman, who was born at Quidhampton in 1552.

Left destitute by the death of his father when he was only twelve, Forman determinedly bettered himself, becoming an apprentice to a general dealer in Salisbury, but persuading a schoolboy who lodged with his master to teach him at night what he had been taught during the day. He was 'a person of indefatigable pains', as Lilly said. After some years of schoolmastering, he went to the Hague, where he studied astrology, in which he had been interested for some time. In 1583 he came to London, set up as a consultant astrologer, and remained there until his death in 1611. Among his enthusiasms was the theatre, and he has been chiefly known to historians as the man who left the earliest impressions of Shakespeare's plays by a contemporary member of the audience.

Dr A. L. Rowse's examinations of Forman's papers in the Bodleian Library reveal in some detail the kind of work Forman did (as well as, it is claimed, the identity of Shakespeare's Dark Lady, Emilia Bassano, whose favours were given as freely to the astrologer as to the playwright). Rowse names the Earl of Hertford, Frances Howard Countess of Essex, Vice-Admiral Sir William Monson, Sir Barrington Mullins, and Sir Thomas Shirley as regular clients of Forman; and he was asked a great number of varied questions, more or less important, more or less amusing. Dean Thomas Blague, of Rochester, a chaplain to the Queen, went to him to ask 'whether his wife be enchanted by Dean Wood or no,' while Mrs Blague gave Forman 26s. 8d. to look into the matter of Dean Wood's lovers, and to tell her what would become of them—and promised to pay him another five pounds 'when he [Wood] is a full friend to her'.

Forman was consulted about lawsuits, the sailing and safety of ships, the whereabouts of stolen articles; there seems to have been no question he would not answer. He took advantage of his position to make love to as many of his women clients as possible, and perhaps for this reason—as well as his tendency to get mixed up in various occult experiments—found his business gradually falling off; by the end of the sixteenth century he was practically bankrupt. But, certainly in our view, and perhaps in that of his contemporaries, he redeemed himself during the early 1590s, when he went to work as an amateur physician in the plague-stricken areas of London, even becoming infected himself.

He is sometimes described as a friend of Lilly's. Since the latter was only eight at the time of his death in 1611, this is not very likely; but certainly Lilly knew many stories about Forman, which he tells in his autobiography—one amusing and characteristic enough to quote, not only as evidence of the idiocy to which some astrologers pretended, but once again, of Lilly's racy style of narrative:

One Coleman, clerk to Sir Thomas Beaumont of Leicestershire, having had some liberal favours both from his lady and her daughters, bragged of it, &c. The Knight brought him into the star-chamber, had his servant sentenced to be pilloried, whipped, and afterwards, during life, to be imprisoned. The sentence was executed in London, and was to be in Leicestershire: two keepers were to convey Coleman from the Fleet to Leicester. My mistress [that is, Mrs. Wright, who evidently was a client of Forman's] taking consideration of Coleman and the miseries he was to suffer, went presently to Forman, acquainted

him therewith; who, after consideration, swore Coleman had lain both with mother and daughters; and besides said that the old Lady being afflicted with fits of the mother, called him into her chamber to hold down the fits with his hands; and that he holding his hands about the breast, she said 'Lower, lower,' and put his hands below her belly; and then—He also told my mistress in what posture he lay with the young ladies, &c, and said 'they intend in Leicester to whip him to death; but I assure thee, Margery, he shall never come there; yet they set forward tomorrow,' says he; and so his two keepers did, Coleman's legs being locked with an iron chain under the horse's belly.

In this nature they travelled the first and second day; on the third day the two keepers, seeing their prisoner's civility the two preceding days, did not lock his chain under the horse's belly as formerly, but locked it only to one side. In this posture they rode some miles beyond Northampton, when on a sudden one of the keepers had a necessity to untruss, and so the other and Coleman stood still; by and by the other keeper desired Coleman to hold his horse, for he had occasion also; Coleman immediately took one of their swords, and ran through two of the horses, killing them stark dead; gets upon the other, with one of their swords; 'Farewell, gentlemen,' quoth he, 'tell my master I have no mind to be whipped in Leicestershire,' and so went his way. The two keepers in all haste went to a gentleman's house near at hand, complaining of their misfortune, and desired of him to pursue their prisoner, which he with much civility granted; but ere the horses could be got ready, the mistress of the house came down and enquired what the matter was, went to the stable, and commanded the horses to be unsaddled, with this sharp speech—'Let the Beaumont and her daughters live honestly, none of my horses shall go forth upon this occasion.'

The kind of astrology practised by Forman (and which was to be practised by Lilly) certainly did no good to what had always been considered a serious study. While Forman claimed to be able to tell Mrs. Wright precisely in what postures Coleman coupled with his mistresses, to give her a charm to prevent her husband committing suicide, to be able to tell some housewife where a stolen jewel was, or when and how he himself would die, more serious theorists stressed that astrology could not be used to predict events; and the astronomers who were reaching out towards new conceptions of the way the universe worked, if they held to the astrological theory at all did so in the belief that it could not be used for the purposes of fortune-telling.

Their scepticism of the popular astrologer, and the ordinary man's tendency to regard him as a magician, somewhat damaged the reputation of astrology. Aubrey, many years, later, wrote of

those darke times [when] Astrologer, Mathematician, and Conjurer were accounted the same things; and the vulgar did verily believe [Thomas Allen, the mathematician and astrologer] to be a Conjurer. He had a great many Mathematicall Instruments and Glasses in his Chamber, which did also confirme the ignorant in their opinion, and his servitor (to impose on Freshmen and simple people) would tell them that sometimes he should meet the Spirits comeing up his staires like Bees.

But the intelligent man's confidence in the astrologer remained unimpaired, and there was sufficient evidence to bolster it. Aubrey recorded that Allen had calculated the nativity of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and that

his death was foretold, which happened true at the time praedicted, at his House at Baynard's Castle, in London. He was very well in health; but because of the Fatal Direction which he lay under, he made a great Entertainment (a Supper) for his Friends: ate and dranke plentifully; went to bed, and died in his sleep.

The struggle between the opportunists who saw astrology as a means of earning a good living by playing on the credulous, and the serious theorists, had started some years before, but now became keener because there was more money about, and the very people whom it was easiest to deceive were able to pay more for the deceit. The theorists were fighting a losing battle, as far as publicity was concerned; though their work behind the scenes was much more interesting.

This focused on an attempt to make astrology more natural and scientific in nature, and to provide a bank of information on which astrologers could draw in their attempts to make personal horoscopes more accurate: to put astrological laws, in fact, on an experimental basis. The result was a growing pile of astrological books such as the Tractatus Astrologicus of Luce Gaurico, Bishop of Civitate. In several volumes, published in 1552, Gaurico published the horoscopes of a great number of well-known people, living and dead, and drew certain conclusions from them. He included seven popes, twenty-nine cardinals and prelates, thirty-four secular rulers, forty-one men of letters and learning, nine musicians, five artists, and forty-six men who had met violent deaths. The main result of publication, for Gaurico, was that he was attacked for libel, and had to flee his city. But his work was typical of, though more comprehensive than, several works of a similar kind.

Meanwhile astrologers, then as now, prepared and published various papers arguing about such technical matters as the division of astrological houses, or the determination of the precise moment of birth. Then there were books written in moderately technical terms, but aimed at an intelligent lay public: such as the Mantice ou discours de la verité de divination par astrologie published in 1558 by Pontus de Tyard, a friend of Ronsard (who himself accepted the validity of astrology). This is a dialogue in which Le Curieux argues against astrology, Mantice defends it, and the author sums up, concluding that astrologers are inaccurate in their predictions only because past astrological tables did not give the true movements of the planets, and encouraging contemporary astronomers towards greater accuracy. And indeed men like Cyprian Leowitz were tireless in working out true planetary positions and publishing them in ephemerides.

Other astrologers were working out their own theories and elaborating them, dismissing or modifying earlier systems. Joannes Francus Offusius, for instance, found Ptolemaic astrology childish, and giving up a lucrative medical practice and refusing pleasant sinecures offered by various princes, lived in virtual isolation working on his own system, in which he attempted to measure quantitatively the influence of the planets, which he believed they exerted through the four qualities rather than by any occult power. The Sun warmed and dried, the Moon moistened and chilled somewhat, Saturn produced cold and dryness, Mars heat and dryness; Venus gave out moisture and heat, while Mercury dried. Convinced that nature followed a numerical, geometrical order, Offusius worked out a complicated system of calculation by which it could be discovered how much of a planet's particular quality was exuded at any one moment of its orbit. (Hot is to dry as the pyramid to the cube; hot to cold as the pyramid to the octahedron, and so on. A system related, of course, to the Pythagorean theories of relationships between numbers and forms, forms and emotions, linking, say, music to medicine in the same terms.)

Serious work was going on in relation to astrological influences in the field of medicine: in the Astrological Medicine of Cornelius Schylander, an Antwerp physician, published in 1570, one is taught diagnosis (without actually having to see the patient!), and how to prognosticate the degree of danger in an illness; and twenty-seven years later, amid a great number of similar works, was published Henri de Monantheuil's Ludus Iatromathematicus, in which he proved to his own, and many other doctors', satisfaction that (as Hippocrates had put it two thousand years earlier) 'a physician without a knowledge of astrology has no right to call himself a physician'.

So, though criticism was growing and the climate of belief changing, astrology was still largely respectable; and the astronomers, who eventually were to become most sceptical of all, still held to it, though they were beginning to modify their opinions. Most of them had to cast horoscopes as part of their professional work. Kepler, teaching mathematics and astronomy at Graz, capital of Styria, published an annual almanac of astrological forecasts (for a fee of twenty florins a year).

There was an example of why some astronomers clung to the astrological theory: partly for money—twenty florins was one-twelfth of Kepler's whole annual income!—but partly also because the theory seemed often to work. For instance, in his first almanac, Kepler promised a cold spell and a Turkish invasion. Six months later he wrote to his friend Michael Maestlin:

By the way, so far the almanac's predictions are proving correct. There is an unheard-of cold in our land. In the Alpine farms people die of the cold. It is reliably reported that when they arrive home and blow their noses, the noses fall off… As for the Turks, on January the first they devastated the whole country from Vienna to Neustadt, setting everything on fire and carrying off men and plunder.

Kepler ended his career as Court Astrologer to the Duke of Wallenstein. He called astrology 'the step-daughter of astronomy', and wrote that 'a mind accustomed to mathematical deduction, when confronted with the faulty foundations [of astrology] resists a long, long time, like an obstinate mule, until compelled by beating and curses to put its foot into that dirty puddle.' But, on the other hand, he wrote a series of wholly serious treatises on astrology, and warned his contemporaries that 'while justly rejecting the stargazers' superstitions, they should not throw out the baby with the bathwater.' 'Nothing exists,' he said elsewhere, 'nor happens in the visible sky that is not sensed in some hidden manner by the faculties of Earth and Nature: these faculties of the spirit here on earth are as much affected as the sky itself.' And, conclusively, 'the belief in the effect of the constellations derives in the first place from experience, which is so convincing that it can be denied only by people who have not examined it.'

It was the hope of Kepler and other serious-minded men that the tendency towards levity and quackery which they already discerned in the mid-sixteenth century could be stemmed. Hieronymus Wolf wrote to the astrologer Cyprian Leowitz in 1557 that astrology would never have been the object of so much envy and hatred if it had not been abused and prostituted by unscrupulous or unqualified men. He hoped that Leowitz and his colleague Girolamo Cardan would restore it to its pristine dignity and authority.

But the tide was against them. As popular belief in astrology grew, so intelligent belief in it waned. There were a number of swingeing attacks on astrologers round about the turn of the century: A Treatise against Judicial Astrology was published in 1601, for instance, by John Chamber, who objected to the theory on several grounds, notably that no-one could know the precise time of a birth (his other objections were properly regarded by astrologers as ignorant; so they are). Thomas Dekker parodied astrology in The Raven's Almanacke in 1609; John Cotts attacked medical astrology in 1612; Christopher Davenport and others argued on theological grounds, and indeed there had been a papal bull against astrology in 1586, and there was to be another in 1631. These had no discernible effect.

The tide was slow in turning. European publications during the first half of the seventeenth century were still largely pro-astrology, many of them serious and well argued. Ilario Altobelli, historian of the Franciscan Order, and an eminent astronomer (who was for some time in correspondence with Galileo) published a number of astrological works, as did Fr. Redento Baranzani of Vercelli, Ferrante de Septem, Alexander Vicentinia, Giacomo Filippo Tomasini of Padua, and many other Italians.

In Germany, Spain, France and northern Europe the tendency, similarly, was to uphold and strengthen astrological beliefs. There were attacks, certainly, but these came almost invariably from those who had not studied the subject very closely: one thinks of Newton's alleged response to Halley, when the latter accused him of being silly enough to believe in astrology. 'Sir: I have studied the matter. You have not.' Antonia Merenda, for instance, whose attack (the title itself is long enough to be tedious) was published in 1640, was a professor of civil law at Pavia, and his arguments against astrology are as simplistic and easily refuted as those of St. Augustine, which they resemble.

But in England at all events, such efforts were vain: the financial temptations were too great, and during the years when Lilly was learning and beginning to practise astrology, there were many more quacks than serious astrologers. He gives character sketches of some of them in his autobiography.

There was Alexander Hart, for instance, who lived out at Houndsditch, and 'had been a soldier formerly, a comely old man, of good aspect'. He practised a little medical astrology, but seems mainly to have been concerned to tell young men when they might most profitably play at dice. Lilly says that he went to Hart several times to ask him various questions, and that he failed every time to give a satisfactory answer.

Then there was Captain Bubb,

a proper handsome man, well spoken, but withal covetous, and of no honesty, as will appear by this story, for which he stood upon the pillory. A certain butcher was robbed, going to a fair, of forty pounds. He goes to Bobb, who for ten pounds in hand paid, would help him to the thief. Appoints the butcher such a night precisely, to watch at such a place, and the thief should come thither—commanded by any means to stop him. The butcher attends according to direction.

About twelve in the night there comes one riding very fiercely upon a full gallop, whom the butcher knocks down, and seized both upon man and horse. The butcher brings the man and horse to the next town, but then the person whom the butcher attacked was John, the servant of Dr. Bubb; for which the Captain was indicted and suffered upon the pillory, and afterwards ended his days in great disgrace.

Jeffery Neve was scarcely more respectable, and had had an interesting career in local government before setting up as an astrologer. He had been a merchant and alderman at Great Yarmouth, and in 1626 was appointed deputy water-baliff of Dover. He then got into trouble with the local aldermen for abusing his position as commissioner under Henry VIII's Bill to encourage archery: he made a small fortune by rigging the figures of the returns which entitled him to one shilling on every branch cut to make a bow.

He seems to have gone bankrupt; went to Holland to study medicine, graduated M. D. at Frankfurt, and set up in London as a quack astrologer. He put to Lilly a scheme for printing two hundred horoscopes set up to answer various questions, in an effort (modelled perhaps on Gaurico) to show astrology to be a science. But, says Lilly, 'when I had perused the first forty, I corrected thirty of them, would read over no more. I showed him how erroneous they were, desired his emendation of the rest, which he performed not.'

Then there were the downright comics, like William Poole, 'a nibbler at astrology', who had been gardener, drawer of linen, plasterer and bricklayer, and used to brag that he had 'been of seventeen professions'. He was very good company, a likeable fellow (Lilly gave away the bride at his wedding), who seems to have managed to keep out of trouble as far as predictions were concerned, though he was once accused by Sir Thomas Jay, J.P., of being suspiciously implicated in the theft of a silver cup. Perhaps he was, for he packed up and left the district; but hearing some months after that the Justice was dead and buried, he came and enquired where the grave was; and after the discharge of his belly upon the grave, left these two verses upon it, which he swore he made himself:

Here lieth buried Sir Thomas Jay, Knight,
Who being dead, I upon his grave did shite.

When he died, in the 1650s, Poole left all his books to Dr. Ardee, another astrologer; and 'one manuscript of my own worth one hundred of Lilly's Introduction'; with the note—'Item: if Dr. Ardee give my wife any thing that is mine, I wish the devil may fetch him body and soul.' So the doctor gave all Poole's books to Lilly, who passed them on to the widow.

Dr. Ardee, by the way, informed Lilly (several times) that 'an angel, one time, appeared unto him and offered him a lease of his life for one thousand years. He died about the age of four score years.' Presumably he had rejected the offer. He had been a friend of the Rev. William Bredon, Vicar of Thornton in Buckinghamshire, who was mildly interested in astrology but notoriously addicted to tobacco and drink—or rather to drinking and smoking, for when he had no tobacco, Lilly tells us, 'he would cut the bell-ropes and smoke them'.

And finally there was Nicholas Fiske, a doctor who became a friend of Lilly's soon after Lilly first became interested in astrology. Fiske was a well-educated man, who had been destined for the university, but instead had decided to give his time to privately studying medicine and astrology, both of which he practised in Colchester and later in London. Lilly admits to having learned much of literature from him; though he also accuses him, because he had Scorpio ascending, of being 'secretly envious to those he thought had more parts then himself'. He does not specify whether the 'parts' were intellectual or sexual; both in abundance fit the Scorpio personality.

There, then, was the astrological scene when Lilly came upon it. As far as England was concerned, scholarly and unscholarly attacks on the theory were increasing, and educated men were for the first time in history beginning to be persuaded that the most that could profitably be said of the subject was that it seemed likely that the positions of the planets had some effect upon terrestrial matters, but that astrologers were certainly not in complete command of the means of precisely stating that effect.

But these opinions, like the two papal Bulls, were to have very little effect upon the credulous middle class, which was now composed of men and women with a certain amount of money which they could afford to lay out upon so promising a possibility as knowing the future, forecasting good or evil luck. Jeffery Neve, Alexander Hart and Captain Bubb were the seventeenth century equivalent of the astrologers who, in the 1970s, make a reasonably lucrative living writing astrological columns for the daily press or the monthly magazines.

Lilly evidently always had a sympathetic eye for a rogue, provided he was an interesting, intelligent and amusing rogue. He was also, certainly, credulous in occult matters. He was to engage in a little fortune-telling himself, though always fairly discreetly; and he was always to maintain a much greater degree of wit, and a higher standard of literacy and often of honesty, than his colleagues.