Clients
According to the popular stereotype, foolish women comprised the majority of diviners’ clients. In a work lambasting fraudulent practitioners, the merchant John Melton described seeing ‘some twenty women’ and an ‘ancient man’ going to visit an astrologer. The old man told him that the women were ‘creatures so ignorantly obstinate, that neither the mild entreaty of a friend can persuade them from their follies, nor the bad report of an enemy dissuade them from their perverseness’ – before confessing that he, too, had lost money to the astrologer’s wiles.1John Melton, Astrologaster, or, The Figure-Caster (London, 1620), pp. 4-5.
In reality, diviners had diverse clients. Men probably went more often than women. As well as going for their own sake, they might go in their capacity as the head of a household, or go on a woman’s behalf to save her from visiting a male stranger. People from all ranks of society used the services of diviners. When Anne Boleyn gave birth to the future Queen Elizabeth in September 1533, the diplomat Eustace Chapuys recorded that she ‘was delivered of a daughter, to the great regret both of [King Henry VIII] and the lady, and to the great reproach of the physicians, astrologers, sorcerers, and sorceresses, who affirmed that it would be a male child’. Chapuys added: ‘But the people are doubly glad that it is a daughter rather than a son, and delight to mock those who put faith in such divinations, and to see them so full of shame’.2Eustace Chapuys to Charles V in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 6, 1533, ed. James Gairdner (London, 1882), p. 465.
Even though interest in divination reached society’s highest echelons, clients as well as diviners courted an element of risk. In 1669, James Hog and his servant John Wood of East Lothian were accused by local ministers of consulting an astrologer to find out who had stolen corn and cloth from Hog’s house. They were ‘sharply rebuked for their sin in going to consult with one whom they supposed a magician or wizard’.3National Records of Scotland (Edinburgh), Humbie kirk session minutes, 25 April 1669, CH2/389/1, p. 278. This was a merciful punishment: in Scotland, unlike in England or Wales, consulting a sorcerer was theoretically punishable by death.
Detail from a 1750 engraving of a fortune-teller reading the palm of the wife of the artist David Teniers the Younger.4Engraving by L. Surugue after David Teniers the Younger (1750), Wellcome Collection.
William Neville (1497-c.1545)5Edited documents in Frank Klaassen and Sharon Hubbs Wright, The Magic of Rogues: Necromancers in Early Tudor England (Pennsylvania, 2021), pp. 30-55.
Image references:
1) Woodcut from A Dialogue between a French and Irish Officer ([London], 1691), EBBA.
2) Woodcut from A Looking-Glass for Lascivious Young Men ([London], c. 1690), EBBA.
3) Detail of woodcut from The History of Mother Shipton (London, 1641), reproduced in John Ashton, Chap-books of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1882), p. 91, Google Books.
4) Woodcut from A Warning and Good Counsel to the Weavers ([London], 1688), EBBA.
5) Woodcut from Faithful Jemmy, and Constant Susan ([London], [1671-1702?]), EBBA.
6) Woodcut from The Judgment of God Shew’d upon Dr. John Faustus (London, [1688-1709?], EBBA. and Goodwin Wharton (1653-1704):6Material from Wharton’s autobiography, British Library, Add. MSS 20006-7 (2 vols).
Image references:
1) Woodcut from A Dialogue between a French and Irish Officer ([London], 1691), EBBA.
2) Woodcut from An Answer to The Merchants Son of Exeter ([London], [1675-96?]), EBBA.
3) Woodcut from Ben Jonson, The Mad-merry Prankes of Robbin Good-fellow (London, [1601-1640?]), EBBA.
4) Woodcut of an angel appearing to a sleeping man, Wellcome Collection.
5) Woodcut from Martin Parker, A Warning for Wives (London, 1629), EBBA.
6) Woodcut from An Answer to the Advice to the Ladies of London ([London], [1685-8?]), EBBA.
A tale of two younger sons
William Neville of Worcestershire was a minor poet, and the second son of twelve children of Richard Neville, second Baron Latimer (c. 1467-1530). Typically in noble families, titles and the bulk of the estate were inherited by the eldest son. Younger sons were often in a much more precarious position, reliant on supporting themselves through employment or marriage. Neville held positions in local government, including as commissioner of the peace for Worcester. He married Elizabeth Greville and had three children. (Images are generic.)
In 1531, Neville visited a cunning man called Nash of Cirencester to discover the location of some stolen spoons. The conversation soon progressed to more interesting topics: Nash informed Neville that his wife was to die within a decade, after which Neville would marry a wealthy young heiress. His brother was also fated to die, meaning that William Neville would become Baron Latimer and inherit the family estate.
Neville also consulted Richard Jones of Oxford. According to Neville’s servant Thomas Wood, Jones raised four devils who showed him a vision. Jones was led to a tower (later identified as part of Warwick Castle), where he saw a picture of Neville in a robe and crown, revealing that he would become earl of Warwick. A third cunning man confirmed the prediction, and Neville found prophetic texts that seemed to refer to his accession.
Neville dabbled in other magics. He got a ring from Jones to ‘obtain favour of great men’, including his brother. He also tasked his servant Edward Legh with making him an invisibility cloak. The recipe included horses’ shinbones, chalk, rosin and powdered glass, with the cloak to be made of linen and buckskin. Legh complained: ‘I could find but one horse leg though I looked for dead horses every day’. The project does not seem to have met with any success.
After further conversation with Nash, Neville also became convinced that King Henry VIII would soon die at sea, and the Scots would invade thereafter. Here he came uncomfortably close to treason. His servants Thomas Wood and Edward Legh wrote to the privy council. Neville and Jones were arrested and questioned in 1532, and the latter was held in the Tower of London for an extended period, but they escaped without any more serious punishment.
The seductive force of the cunning-men’s visions had led William Neville down a dangerous path, and he was lucky to escape with no worse punishment than public shaming. Cunning-people played significant roles in their local communities, among clients of comparable social status, but Neville’s story reveals that they were by no means confined to this sphere. Fathoming out the future was an alluring project for men and women of all social ranks.
Goodwin Wharton was the third son of Philip Wharton, fourth Baron Wharton (1613-1696). He attempted to enter politics, and was elected to parliament in 1680, but a furious attack on the soon-to-be James II in his maiden speech saw him shunned. He instead pursued a variety of schemes to get rich, including treasure-hunting, attempts at invention and deep-sea diving. In the 1690s he found more stability and success in politics, sitting as an MP and serving as one of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty in 1697-9. (Images are generic.)
In 1683 Wharton met the cunning-woman Mary Parish. He was 30; she was 52. Wharton soon became fascinated by Parish. She practised alchemy and astrology, made love charms and was an accomplished healer. She also claimed to have a familiar spirit and a host of contacts in the fairy realm. They began a sexual relationship, which lasted until her death twenty years later. Wharton reckoned that she conceived 107 children during this period, although only one or two survived into adulthood.
Parish facilitated Wharton’s connections with the realm of fairies. She informed him that the fairy queen had fallen in love with him, and regularly had sexual intercourse with him while he slept. The fairy queen promised to make Wharton king of fairyland. Parish made multiple attempts to arrange a meeting between Wharton and the fairies, but something always came up to prevent it: the entrance to fairyland was flooded, the queen had her period, mourning for the former king made visits impossible, or another fairy had tried to poison the queen with chocolate.
Through Parish, Wharton also encountered angels. Parish acted as the scryer, and the angels appeared to her in a glass of water. After a little while they began to speak to Wharton. Mysteriously, their voices sometimes seemed to emanate from Parish herself. Sometimes the angels anointed Wharton while he slept. On to his nightcap they poured the ‘best pure salad oil’, mixed with oil of rosemary; it soaked through to his head. The angels also shaved the front of his hairline while he slept to give him a more noble high forehead.
Wharton and Parish created an altar to the angels, decorated in the Catholic style. Parish was then Catholic (she later converted); Wharton was Protestant. He found the Catholic imagery worrying, but the angels assured him it was not idolatrous. In due course, God himself began to speak through the door or walls when Parish was out of the room. He promised Wharton release from his burdens. Wharton later heard God in his own head, and learned that he was the ‘Solar King of the World’, destined to father the next monarch and repopulate the nation.
Wharton’s experiences must be understood in relation to the wider cultural context. He was more extreme than most in his beliefs about the supernatural world, but he lived in a period when it was wholly reasonable to believe that the atmosphere was infused with invisible spirits, or that Satan, angels or God might inject thoughts into a person’s mind. How far Parish believed the stories she wove with and for Wharton is impossible to know, but it is clear that the two had a mutually inspiriting relationship, and shared a commitment to divining occult knowledge.
A mid eighteenth-century engraving of a maid.7A. H. Payne after Jean-Étienne Liotard (c. 1743), Wellcome Collection.
In 1698, the Old Bailey heard a case of a maid decieved by a fortune-teller and her accomplices.8Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 20 July 1698.
John Adshed, alias Davenport, and John Holiday, were indicted for breaking the house of Edward Rowen on the 15th of June, and taking several pieces of stuff … It appeared that the prosecutor being from home, another woman prevailed with his maid to go abroad; and falling into a music-house, where was a pretended fortune-teller, they hearkened to her prophecy, and were told that the first man that should enter the room would be husband to the maid; and it happened, either by accident or contrivance, that Adshed was the first man that came in; who pretending much love and courtship to the maid, would needs see her home; which being admitted, he stayed late in the house; and next day coming again to renew his feigned courtship, carried the maid over the water, and into the Folly on the Thames [a coffeehouse], and in the evening returned home … and that night stayed till 11 o’ clock … next morning the door was found open, and the goods taken away…
