LILLY, WILLIAM, a noted English astrologer, was born in 1602 in Leicestershire, where his father not being able to give him more learning than common writing and arith-
Lilyæum metric, he resolved to seek his fortune in London. He arrived in 1620, and lived four years as a servant to a mantua-maker in the parish of St Clement Danes; but he then moved a step higher to the service of Mr Wright, master of the Salters' Company in the Strand; and as he was not able to write, Lilly, amongst other offices, kept his books. In 1627, when his master died, he paid his addresses to the widow, whom he married with a fortune of £1000. Being now his own master, he followed the puritanical preachers; and turning his mind to judicial astrology, became the pupil of one Evans, a profligate Welsh parson, in that pretended art. Getting a manuscript of the Ars Notitia of Cornelius Agrippa, with alterations, he drank in the doctrine of the magic circle, and the invocation of spirits, with great eagerness. He was the author of the Merlinus Anglicus junior, the Supernatural Sight, and the White King's Prophecy. In him we have an instance of the general superstition and ignorance that prevailed in the time of the civil war between Charles I. and his parliament; for the king consulted this astrologer to know in what quarter he should conceal himself, if he could escape from Hampton Court; and General Fairfax, on the other side, sent for him to his army, to ask him if he could tell by his art, whether God was with them and their cause. Lilly, who made his fortune by favourable predictions to both parties, assured the general that God would be with him and his army. In 1648, he published his treatise of the Three Suns seen the preceding winter; and also an astrological judgment upon a conjunction of Saturn and Mars. This year the council of state gave him in money £50, and a pension of £100 per annum, which he received for two years, and then resigned on some disgust. In June 1660, he was taken into custody by order of the parliament, by whom he was examined concerning the person who had cut off the head of King Charles I. The same year he sued out his pardon under the great seal of England. When the plague raged in London, he removed with his family to his estate at Hersham; and in October 1666, he was examined before a Committee of the House of Commons concerning the fire of London, which happened in September that year. After his retirement to Hersham, he applied himself to the study of physic, and, by means of his friend Mr Ashmole, obtained from Archibald Sheldon a license for the practice of it. A little before his death he adopted for his son, by the name of Merlin the Younger, one Henry Coley, a tailor by trade; and at the same time gave him the impression of his almanack, after it had been printed for thirty-six years. He died in 1681 of a dead palsy. Mr Ashmole placed a monument over his grave in the church of Walton-upon-Thames. His Observations on the Life and Death of Charles, late king of England, if we overlook the astrological nonsense, may be read with as much satisfaction as more celebrated histories; Lilly being not only very well informed, but strictly impartial. This work, with the Lives of Lilly and Ashmole, written by themselves, were published in one volume 8vo, in 1774, by Mr Burman.