Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 33.djvu/266

Rh astrologer, John Booker [q. v.], to come to him at Windsor, and entreated them to discontinue their practices unless they could convince themselves that they were lawful, and agreeable to God's word. Hugh Peters supported Fairfax's arguments, but their appeal did not prevent Lilly from procuring a saw and some aquafortis to send to the king, to enable him to escape from Carisbrook Castle, in 1648. In September 1648 Lilly claims to have rendered Charles further assistance.

Meanwhile Lilly was ostensibly serving the parliament. In 1648 he obtained political information from France, which the parliament rewarded with a gift of 50l., and the council of state with a pension of 100l., which was paid him for two years. He attended the king's trial, and on 6 Jan. 1648–9 he published ‘A peculiar Prognostication astrologically predicted according to art, whether or no his Majestie shall suffer Death this present yeare 1649: the Possibility thereof discussed and divulged.’

In August 1648 Lilly and Booker were ordered to attend the parliamentary army engaged in the siege of Colchester, so as to encourage the soldiers with predictions of speedy victory. In 1651 he excited new attention by his ‘Monarchy and no Monarchy,’ in which he asserted that ‘England should no more be governed by a king,’ and added sixteen hieroglyphical engravings, two of which he declared portrayed the plague and fire of London. An appendix included ‘Passages on the Life and Death of King Charles,’ which reappeared in a revised form in Lilly's ‘True History of King James the First and King Charles the First’ (1715). In 1652 he devoted 950l. to the purchase of a house and lands at Horsham. In his almanac for 1653 he declared that the commonalty and soldiery would quickly combine to overthrow the parliament. For this prediction he was summoned before the committee of plundered ministers, but the speaker, Lenthall, privately pointed out to Lilly the offensive passages, and Lilly was dexterous enough to present the committee with amended copies when he appeared before them. He was detained in custody for thirteen days, and then released (Commons' Journals, vii. 195). On 16 Feb. 1653–4 Lilly lost his shrewish wife, and ‘shed no tears.’ In October 1654 he married for a third time. His third wife's maiden name was Ruth Needham.

In 1652 Lilly had published his ‘Annus Tenebrosus, or the dark Year, together with the short Method how to judge the Effects of Eclipses,’ and had dedicated it ‘to the commonwealth of England.’ His bold claim to be treated as a scientific investigator roused Thomas Gataker [q. v.] in 1654 to vehemently denounce him as an impostor in his ‘Discours Apologeticall, wherein Lillies lewd and loud Lies are clearly laid open.’ Lilly retorted with similar frankness in his next year's almanac. In 1655 he was also indicted, on the suit of a half-witted woman, at the Middlesex sessions for having unlawfully given judgment respecting the recovery of stolen goods, and received half-a-crown, but he was acquitted, in spite of the presence among the magistrates of many presbyterians, to whom he was obnoxious on account of his expression of political opinion. In 1659 the king of Sweden acknowledged a complimentary nativity cast for him by Lilly in his almanacs for 1657 and 1658 by sending him a present of a gold chain and medal. The almanac for 1658 had been translated into German, and published at Hamburg. That for 1653 was translated into both Dutch and Danish. In 1659 ‘G. J., a lover of art and honesty,’ probably John Gadbury [q. v.], held Lilly up to ridicule in ‘Ψευδο-αστρολόγος or the spurious Prognosticator’ (cf. Notes and Queries, 1st ser. x. 362, for an offensive mock epitaph written in 1651).

At the Restoration Lilly was taken into custody, and was rigidly examined by a committee of the House of Commons respecting his knowledge of the details of Charles I's execution (Commons' Journals, viii. 53, 56). He asserted that the executioner was Cornet Joyce, and he was soon set at liberty, but he was directed to attend the trials of many of the regicides. Pepys describes a convivial evening spent with Lilly and his friends at his house in the Strand on 24 Oct. 1660. Ashmole was present, with John Booker. The latter, in private conversation with the diarist, blamed Lilly for still ‘keeping in with the times, as he did formerly to his own dishonour, and not [working] according to the rules of art, by which he could not err as he had done’ (Diary, i. 116). In January 1660–1 Lilly was again arrested without any legal justification, but at once took the oaths to Charles II, and sued out a pardon under the broad seal at a cost of 13l. 6s. 8d. Lawsuits respecting his property occupied him in 1663 and 1664, and in the same years he became churchwarden of Walton-on-Thames, and set the parochial affairs in order. In 1665 he fled before the plague to his seat at Hersham. In October 1666 Lilly was examined by the committee appointed to investigate the causes of the great fire, and set forth in very obscure terms the grounds on which he had based a prediction of the fire in his hieroglyphics of 1651. At the trial, in April 1667, of one