In 1684 William Boreman, a physician who also practised as an exorcist and had a strong interest in magic and witchcraft, received a fine for saying that Charles II’s brother, the duke of York, was ‘a great wizard … and that he rides about at night in fiery chariots to torment souls, and [is] preparing for a field of blood [with] his witchcraft [and that he] will lay the nation in blood and Popish slavery’.Footnote ¹ Boreman’s mixture of prophetic denunciation and traditional witchcraft libel is a reminder of the extent to which suspicions of witchcraft were entangled with religious belief at the end of the seventeenth century. Both were entangled with politics – in this case, the struggle between the Tory supporters of royal prerogative and the Whig supporters of parliamentary sovereignty. The conflict between Tories and Whigs was, in turn, rooted in the older clash between Royalists and Parliamentarians in the Civil War. The Whigs were the eventual victors, installing a constitutional monarchy definitively beholden to Parliament on the death of Queen Anne in 1714. In hindsight, many later historians tended to view the proponents of constitutional reform as representatives of the Enlightenment, replacing the irrationality of absolutism with the rational idea of an accountable ruler. Yet the wild allegations levelled against the future James II by the Whig Boreman show that belief in magic cannot be linked simplistically with any one political tendency. There was no straightforward dichotomy between ‘superstitious’ conservatives and ‘rational’ political reformers in the second half of the seventeenth century. The reality was more complex.

The execution of Charles I in 1649 was a watershed in British (and arguably European) history. It was an unprecedented event. Kings had been killed before, sometimes in the most sordid of circumstances – but always in palace coups, in political assassinations or on the field of battle. A public, judicial execution of the king as a traitor was calculated to evacuate the sacredness and magic of monarchy, although for Royalists the set-piece death of Charles also gave him the perfect martyrdom. Thenceforth the country was divided between those anxious to restore the magic of monarchy and those keen to pursue a post-monarchical future. The 1650s saw unprecedented freedom of speech, religion and ideas. Occult traditions were an important part of the mix, inspiring the radical sectaries of the period and even influencing the course of political events.

The restoration of Charles II in 1660 resulted in the overthrow of many of the freedoms of the 1650s, but Charles was also compelled to accommodate some of the social changes of the Interregnum, making the 1660s ‘the beginnings of a genuinely plural society’.Footnote ² The restored Church of England, divided within itself, was unable to suppress entirely the ‘speculative religion’ that had received so much encouragement from the freedoms of the Interregnum.Footnote ³ Furthermore, Charles himself was interested in the occult, patronising alchemists, rewarding magicians and taking control once more of astrological publications. Ever shadowed by his father’s ignominious fate, Charles II was anxious to project an image of his quasi-magical power, and he touched more frequently for the king’s evil than any other monarch in English history.

Charles II’s failure to produce a legitimate child meant that the succession devolved upon his brother James, duke of York, an unpopular figure whose conversion to Catholicism did his reputation no favours with the majority of the country. At the end of the 1670s, a strand of radical Protestantism violently opposed to the accession of the duke of York produced a massive conspiracy theory, the so-called Popish Plot, which spawned in turn a parliamentary attempt to exclude the duke from the throne on the grounds of his faith (the Exclusion Crisis). When James II finally became king, his failure to convince the population at large of the benefits of religious toleration for Catholics and dissenters precipitated an invasion of England by the stadtholder of the Netherlands, James’s nephew and son-in-law William of Orange, resulting in James’s flight to France and the installation of William III and his wife Mary II (James’s eldest daughter) as joint monarchs.

Throughout all of this political turmoil, occult traditions continued to play a role in the political life of the nation. Belief in occult ideas cannot be associated with one particular faction in the tumultuous events of seventeenth-century Britain, despite the attempts of some earlier historians to link it with radicalism.Footnote ⁴ Political conservatives such as Royalists and, later, Jacobites had their own reasons for engaging in occult practices, which were not necessarily the same as those of Interregnum radicals and Restoration Whigs. For political radicals, the potential of occult traditions to reconcile paradox rendered them a means of coming to terms with a dramatically changed political reality, while the emphasis on direct experience rather than received wisdom in some occult traditions chimed with the preoccupations of radical forms of Protestantism. For conservatives, by contrast, astrology, alchemy, prophecy and natural magic provided a reassuring connection with an ancient past and served to validate the institution of monarchy, encoding private political meanings that could not always be openly expressed.

However, the period between the execution of Charles I and the death of Queen Anne also witnessed the decline of official support for the persecution of accused witches and the dwindling of accusations of magical treason. A longing for stability after the chaos of the Civil War, and a lingering association between fear of witchcraft and religious and political fanaticism, may explain the reluctance of post-Restoration politicians and legislators to get involved with the issue of witchcraft (at least in England). Just as medieval Chinese emperors’ persecution of sorcerers undermined their desired self-image as benevolent Confucian monarchs,Footnote ⁵ the presence of witchcraft in Restoration England undermined the legitimacy and credibility of the regime, so it was better to ignore witches than to persecute them. The decline of government involvement in the punishment of occult crimes did not necessarily reflect a decline of belief in magic and witchcraft; rather, what took place was a dissociation of supernatural crimes from politics. The practice of magic lost none of its stigma, but witchcraft was relegated to being a crime exclusively against individuals rather than an offence against the state.Footnote ⁶

An Occult Republic, 1649–1660

Following the execution of Charles I on 30 January 1649, England was formally a republic for eleven years until 1660. The whole period is sometimes referred to as the Commonwealth, although the period between 1653 and 1660 is often called the Protectorate; another term for the entire period is the Interregnum. The religious views of supporters of the new English republic were diverse, ranging from orthodox Calvinist presbyterianism and theologically conservative independent congregationalism to a variety of radical sects who adopted non-traditional interpretations of the Bible and even accepted the validity of personal illumination alongside or even ahead of Scripture. In one sense, the collapse of Stuart monarchy meant the end of a court politics sustained by Neoplatonic and Hermetic ideas and an occult national myth woven around the figures of Merlin and King Arthur.Footnote ⁷ In another sense, however, the Civil War and the triumph of Parliament opened a Pandora’s Box as far as popular knowledge of occult traditions was concerned. The breakdown of old orthodoxies meant that some were prepared to experiment with dangerous ideas hitherto forbidden, considered socially unacceptable, or confined to a learned elite.

The tight control the government had traditionally maintained on printing broke down in the 1650s, resulting in the virtual end of censorship. This enabled, among other things, the publication of books about magic, although their authors numbered both Royalists and Parliamentarians.Footnote ⁸ They included defences of ‘good’ magic such as Thomas Vaughan’s Magia Adamica (1650),Footnote ⁹ as well as translations of previously illicit books such as Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy (translated by Robert Turner in 1651) and even the notorious pseudo-Agrippan Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy (translated by Turner in 1655).Footnote ¹⁰ By contrast, between 1621 and 1643 even pamphlet accounts of witchcraft had not appeared, probably because James’s and Charles’s bishops wanted to discourage witch-hunting as a Puritan preoccupation.Footnote ¹¹ Witchcraft was always perceived as a sign of disorder, and its existence in the nation was therefore a potential rebuke to Charles’s personal rule.Footnote ¹²

In 1650, Parliament repealed the Act of Uniformity of 1559, which had required everyone to attend services of the Church of England, inaugurating a period of unprecedented religious liberty. The idea of religious toleration was strongly associated at this time with mystical beliefs, since it was generally only those who believed in truths transcending the dogmas of individual Christian denominations who were prepared to countenance the co-existence of a variety of beliefs. For the presbyterians and congregationalist independents who dominated the higher echelons of the Puritan Parliamentarian state, toleration was an opportunity to make the case for their brand of religion as the new official religion of England, and not a good in and of itself. Yet alchemists had long advocated a radical form of religious tolerance, believing that the division of Christendom brought about by the Reformation was an unnatural state of affairs that would be resolved only by an alchemical illumination transcending doctrinal divisions.Footnote ¹³ During the Interregnum, the learned Polish émigré, Samuel Hartlib (1600–62), advocated the establishment of a ‘Solomon’s House’ for the sharing of all wisdom, after the model proposed in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627). Hartlib received the support of many future fellows of the Royal Society,Footnote ¹⁴ and in 1649 his follower John Hall addressed Parliament on the need to advance learning in ‘chymistry’.Footnote ¹⁵ Similarly, the radical occultism of Paracelsus flourished for the first time in England during this period.Footnote ¹⁶

Gerard Winstanley (1609–76), a leader of the ‘True Levellers’ or Diggers, who argued for political and social equality and began to occupy common land in 1649, was one of the radicals inspired by alchemical thought. He may have been influenced to think along alchemical lines by another Digger, William Everard, who had a reputation as a conjurer and was influenced in turn by the Behmenist minister John Pordage.Footnote ¹⁷ The natural magician Elias Ashmole was the patron of Pordage’s living, and admired Pordage’s knowledge of astronomy in spite of his political differences (Ashmole was a committed Royalist). However, Pordage was deprived from the ministry in 1654 for blasphemy and necromancy.Footnote ¹⁸ Pordage’s ‘communism’ rejected the state, private property and even the family (his followers were expected to renounce sexual relations) on the basis of Jacob Boehme’s theory of hermaphroditic genesis, in which God originally created a single sex.Footnote ¹⁹ Another Interregnum radical with an interest in alchemy, although he kept it concealed from all but his close friends, was the ‘chronic conspirator’ and Leveller John Wildman (c. 1621–93), who ended up as Postmaster General under Charles II.Footnote ²⁰

Winstanley considered the interaction of original sin, the four elements and the Holy Spirit to be an alchemical process, identifying human rebelliousness with ‘masculine’ sulphur and the elements with ‘feminine’ mercury.Footnote ²¹ Winstanley believed that the curse of death brought by Adam’s disobedience caused human bodies to decay in the earth, thereby corrupting the entirety of material creation. The Holy Spirit was, for Winstanley, a purging alchemical fire that would purify mercury (the elements) from original sin (sulphur).Footnote ²² Winstanley believed that this purifying spirit had been released in 1649 and would soon bring an end to all conflict, resulting in the abolition of private property:Footnote ²³

Winstanley’s belief in alchemy allowed him to come to terms with the Diggers’ overthrow of the established hierarchy, because the political disruption of the 1640s could be interpreted in terms of God’s alchemical purification of human nature.Footnote ²⁵ That purification would result in a mystical union of spirit and matter that would end storms, earthquakes and other portents of divine displeasure.Footnote ²⁶ Winstanley was neither a learned man nor (so far as we know) a practising alchemist; his use of alchemical ideas and vocabulary is an indication of the extent to which this language had entered the common intellectual vernacular by the mid-seventeenth century, which can be attributed in large part to the spread of the mystical philosophy of Jacob Boehme (1575–1624). Although Boehme’s writings were initially popularised in England by the mainstream Puritan lawyer John Sparrow – who wanted Charles I to read them – they were soon picked up by religious radicals including Henry Pinnell, William Erbery, Morgan Llwyd, John Webster, Lodowick Muggleton and the Quakers.Footnote ²⁷

The emphasis of alchemy – or more specifically its medical branch, iatrochymistry – on the possibility of universal panaceas and the indwelling of a divine principle in the human body meant that those who were steeped in this doctrine were open to radical notions of personal illumination.Footnote ²⁸ Extreme theological and philosophical speculations did not always translate into revolutionary politics in practice, but it did not take long for opponents of the sectaries such as the Puritan theologian Richard Baxter to see occultism of any kind, which he traced back to ‘Paracelsus a drunken Conjurer’, as an existential threat to the Commonwealth.Footnote ²⁹ Similarly, the presbyterian minister, Thomas Hall railed against the ‘Familistical-Levelling-Magical’ temper of the times.Footnote ³⁰ In the 1650s, the prophecy of Mary Clary that the secret of the Philosophers’ Stone would be generally known by 1661 even led some radicals to plan a utopian colony in which the search for alchemical enlightenment could finally be realised.Footnote ³¹

England’s republic may have been a short-lived experiment, but it had one very important result that depended to a large extent on the influence of radical mystical thought. In 1656, the first Jews openly settled in England since Edward I’s expulsion of all Jews from the country in 1290. Although the re-admission of the Jews to England was partly motivated by financial and mercantile considerations, there was also a strong religious element to the argument for re-admission, which drew on apocalyptic and occult beliefs. Although anti-Semitism had been rife in the Christian church since its early centuries, the Renaissance discovery of Hebrew studies gave rise to a great deal of enthusiasm for the Jewish Kabbalah, which was widely believed to be as old as Moses himself. As early as 1641, the Parliamentarian mathematician and natural philosopher John Wilkins reported that some said the Jewish Kabbalah encoded ‘every secret that belongs to any art of science’, although Wilkins himself remained sceptical of this claim.Footnote ³² If the Jews were the custodians of this secret source of knowledge, this strengthened the case for admitting them to England.

The first stirrings of interest in a Christian form of Kabbalah occurred in pre-Reformation England among a small group of Renaissance humanists. Interest in Kabbalah continued in Elizabeth’s reign, albeit on a small scale. Alongside John Dee, the leading Catholic Sir Thomas Tresham explored the possibilities of Kabbalistic numerology for concealing his profession of the Catholic faith,Footnote ³³ while a small community of exiled ‘New Christians’ (converted Jews) from Spain and Portugal in London may have explored Kabbalism.Footnote ³⁴ It is possible that Jewish exiles from Iberia in the 1590s considered settling in England before they decided on Amsterdam as their destination.Footnote ³⁵ At the Stuart court in the 1630s, apocalyptic Kabbalism was one of the influences that the regime’s propagandists drew upon to proclaim the dawning of a ‘Golden Age’.Footnote ³⁶

The English Revolution of the 1640s, with its strong religious emphasis on the Old Testament, was accompanied by apocalyptic expectations of the imminent end of the world, which some believed could occur only when the Jews were scattered to the ends of the earth. Furthermore, the Book of Revelation seemed to stipulate that the end of the world would come only after the salvation of 144,000 Jews, which led some Puritans to believe the conversion of Jews was an urgent priority. Some Puritans even went so far as to move to Amsterdam and convert to Judaism themselves, while John Tany, a religious radical whose writings drew on Agrippa and Jacob Boehme, claimed to be ‘high priest of the Jews’, sent to gather up the remnant of Israel in England. Tany attacked a doorkeeper in the House of Commons in 1655 after hearing that Oliver Cromwell was to be offered the crown.Footnote ³⁷

Menasseh ben Israel (1604–57), the Amsterdam rabbi who interceded with Cromwell for the return of the Jews to England, shared these apocalyptic expectations in a slightly different form. A follower of the influential Kabbalist Isaac Luria (1534–72), Menasseh ben Israel believed that the coming of the Messiah was imminent and might be hastened by meditation on the mysteries of the Hebrew alphabet.Footnote ³⁸ Lurianic Kabbalism was concerned not so much with using mystical means to change history, but with hastening the end of history by achieving an occult understanding of the process by which creation came into being in the first place.Footnote ³⁹ Luria believed that God required Jews to co-operate with him to achieve the restoration (tikkun) of all things to their primordial state, hastening the appearance of the Messiah and thereby the end of history.Footnote ⁴⁰ The act of restoration was, in a sense, a magical process because it was dependent on the exercise of ‘mystical intention’ (kawannah) by individuals who directed the power of their wills towards the achievement of tikkun.Footnote ⁴¹ For a Lurianic Kabbalist such as Menasseh ben Israel, therefore, the return of the Jews to England would be achieved not just by negotiation but also by a form of directed magical intent. Indeed, the Lurianic Kabbalists’ view of prayer was always in danger of ‘degeneration into mechanical magic and theurgy’.Footnote ⁴² It is unlikely that Ben Israel regarded the return of the Jews to England as the result of magic; but it was, for Kabbalists, the outcome of kawannah, a special kind of directed prayer with the power to achieve real-world results.

The early Jewish settlers of 1656, although they were technically still without a legal basis to practice their religion, established a crucial foothold for non-Christian religion in England. The contemporary Sephardic Jewish community in Britain traces its origins directly to this seventeenth-century settlement. The integration of Jews into English society would lead, ultimately, to the political and social emancipation of Jews and other non-Christians, as well as weakening the case for restricting civil rights to Trinitarian Christians. The mystical speculations of Menasseh ben Israel and his supporters, therefore, produced results of profound significance for Britain’s future as an open, tolerant society.

Restoring the Magic of Monarchy, 1660–1685

The proliferation of sects interested in occultism during the Interregnum produced something of a reaction against magic at the Restoration, and belief in magic was satirised at the time by poets and dramatists.Footnote ⁴³ Yet Charles II’s own approach to natural magic was positive. Desperate to revive the mystique of monarchy that had been fatally undermined by the public execution of his father in 1649, Charles made strenuous efforts to reinvigorate the ceremony of royal touching for the king’s evil. Charles was by far the most prolific of royal touchers, regularly touching 600 people in one ceremony,Footnote ⁴⁴ and touching as many as 100,000 people during the course of his reign.Footnote ⁴⁵ Furthermore, where Elizabeth, James and Charles I had discouraged a view of the ceremony as ‘magical’, Charles allowed this perception to creep back. One author of a pamphlet on the royal touch published in 1665, The Excellency or Handy Work of the Royal Hand, declared that ‘when a man [i.e. the king] does that which another cannot do, we usually say He conjures … that Magic is laudable, and lawful, where there is not Potentia in nocendo sed restituendo [not power to do harm, but to restore or cure]’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Since this pamphlet got past the royal censors, its content is an indication that Charles’s government was prepared to tolerate (if not endorse) the view that the king was performing natural magic.

Individuals who went to receive the royal touch sometimes sold the gold coin touched by the king as a magical charm,Footnote ⁴⁷ and touchpieces were also swapped without monetary exchange. This was especially true of angels touched by Charles I, which were considered relics of the martyred king during and after the Interregnum and were eagerly shared by Royalists, adding an extra layer of supernatural power to an already magical object.Footnote ⁴⁸ The transformation of touchpieces into exchangeable amulets clearly implied the magical nature of the royal touch and undermined official statements that the royal touch was nothing more than a special form of prayer. However, like his father, Charles II was forced to contend with a rival practitioner of miraculous healing by touch. In 1666, an Irish Protestant landowner, Valentine Greatrakes (1629–83) arrived in London and began ‘stroking’ people suffering from various illnesses, including scrofula. Although Greatrakes had been involved with the Cromwellian regime in Ireland, his patrons were largely drawn from the scrupulously loyal Royalist establishment in both Ireland and England. Nevertheless, Greatrakes’s claim to be able to cure the king’s evil by touch was politically sensitive, and in February 1666 he was summoned to demonstrate his abilities to the king himself, who was less than impressed.Footnote ⁴⁹

Nevertheless, Greatrakes’s supporters seized on his loyalism as evidence ‘that all revelations were not fanatical’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Maintaining the authenticity of Greatrakes was crucial for conformists who wanted to refute both materialists like Thomas Hobbes and the accusation that wonder-working was confined to the sectaries. Greatrakes was a hero for the ‘anti-Sadducists’, a movement of churchmen who were concerned that Interregnum sects such as Muggletonianism had undermined traditional belief in the afterlife and in disembodied spirits. For the anti-Sadducists, it was necessary to tread a fine line between the religious fanaticism associated with Puritanism and the ‘atheism’ of Hobbes and the libertines of the Restoration court. Court preachers did not pull their punches against the Puritans, portraying the Restoration as the literal exorcism of the nation from bewitchment by the ‘state-witches’ and ‘state-wizards’ of the Commonwealth, with Thomas Reeve declaring from the pulpit of Waltham Abbey in 1661 that ‘The whole Land hath been possessed with evil spirits, and Westminster hall hath been a Demoniac’.Footnote ⁵¹ The rhetoric was even ceremonially enacted during Charles’s coronation procession, when the king passed under a triumphal arch in which the personifications of Rebellion and Confusion appeared as hideous witches.Footnote ⁵²

Charles II took back control of astrological almanacs, requiring each one to be licensed by the astrologer George Wharton, who had suffered during the Interregnum for his Royalist prognostications.Footnote ⁵³ Charles relied on Elias Ashmole for astrological advice on his dealings with Parliament, asking Ashmole to calculate the most propitious time to ask Parliament in person for money for the war against the Dutch, which he did on 27 October 1673.Footnote ⁵⁴ The palmist Richard Saunders recommended in 1663 that the king should have no fewer than three permanent astrological advisers.Footnote ⁵⁵ In 1669, Louis XIV, hearing from Charles’s illegitimate son the duke of Monmouth that the English king was fond of astrologers, appointed a well-known French astrologer and alchemist, the Abbé Pregnani, as a diplomatic envoy to the English court. However, Charles was unimpressed when Pregnani failed to predict any winning horses on a visit to Newmarket with the king.Footnote ⁵⁶ Pregnani was also supposed to be assisting the alchemists in Charles’s personal laboratory, while in reality he was conducting secret diplomacy on behalf of Louis.Footnote ⁵⁷

The Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81, when Parliament attempted to exclude Charles’s Catholic brother James from the succession to the throne, produced rival astrological prognostications from the pro- and anti-exclusionist parties.Footnote ⁵⁸ The idea of astrological calculation as a treasonous act also persisted after the Restoration. In 1667, George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham was accused of engaging the astrologer John Heydon to calculate the date of the king’s death. Heydon was imprisoned in the Tower and used the opportunity to write tomes of Rosicrucian philosophy.Footnote ⁵⁹ The astrologer John Gadbury was forced to deny that he had offered his services when, during the so-called Popish Plot of 1678, he was confronted with evidence that a woman had asked him to calculate Charles’s horoscope.Footnote ⁶⁰ The Royal Navy apparently continued to take the threat of witchcraft seriously: in 1667 two women were arrested in Ipswich after a ship’s captain reported that a ship was lost in storms after two witches perched on the maintop.Footnote ⁶¹ Yet the Popish Plot of 1678–81, in spite of the fact that it coincided almost exactly with a huge panic about treasonous sorcery at the French court (the ‘Affair of the Poisons’), was remarkably free from accusations of magic.Footnote ⁶² Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, whose murder prompted the supposed ‘disclosure’ of the plot, was a close friend and supporter of the healer Valentine Greatrakes, while Israel Tonge, who helped Titus Oates fabricate allegations against Catholics, was interested in alchemy,Footnote ⁶³ but the absence of an obvious occult element from the Popish Plot (in spite of the wild accusations of Oates and others) is surely an indication that interest in the occult arts was no longer associated (as it had been a century earlier) with Catholics.

Charles II patronised alchemists as well as astronomers, bringing with him back to England the French alchemist Nicolas le Fèvre, who established a laboratory in St James’s Palace.Footnote ⁶⁴ Charles’s personal physicians Edmund Dickinson and Albert Otto Faber were also dedicated alchemists,Footnote ⁶⁵ and it has even been suggested that Charles died of kidney failure in 1685 as a result of mercury poisoning from alchemical experiments conducted beneath his chamber in a laboratory built in 1672.Footnote ⁶⁶ Charles may have maintained alchemical laboratories not only in the hope of filling the treasury like earlier monarchs, but also to underscore the point that the Restoration was an event of alchemical significance, ‘the resurrection of the dead king’ and the restoration of the body politic to the purity of gold.Footnote ⁶⁷ The language of alchemy was intrinsically monarchical, perhaps reflecting the fact that it originated with medieval alchemists who served in royal courts.Footnote ⁶⁸ However, Le Fèvre hinted in a letter of 1660 that Charles was personally interested in occultism and was a ‘Teutonicus’ (follower of Jacob Boehme). Instead of ordering Le Fèvre to multiply gold for the treasury, following the pattern of medieval monarchs, Charles commanded the French alchemist to begin work on the ‘Great Cordial’ proposed by Sir Walter Raleigh, an alchemical elixir that was supposed to cure all ills by harnessing the ‘inner light’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Nevertheless, the officials of Charles’s court seem to have regarded Le Fèvre as little more than an apothecary and neglected to pay him until 1663.Footnote ⁷⁰ Le Fèvre’s ‘sovereign remedy’, promising ‘restoration’ of health, was surely a political double-entendre that directly symbolised Charles’s rule. The recipe called for gold, pearls, ambergris, spices, rare roots and the flesh, heart and liver of a viper.Footnote ⁷¹

Alchemical talent was a commodity in demand at the Restoration court. The gifted London cunning-woman, Mary Parish, was repeatedly harassed by Prince Rupert for her alchemical secrets and finally recruited by Thomas Williams, Charles II’s ‘chemical physician’, to assist him in distilling alchemical medicines for the king. Parish soon realised that Williams not only wanted to seduce her sexually but was also after her trade secrets.Footnote ⁷² Parish also told her lover Goodwin Wharton that she had received a personal audience with the future James II (then the duke of York) not long before Charles II’s death in which James had asked her for ‘a certain plaster she was known to make that prevented miscarriages’ (James’s wife Mary of Modena had suffered a series of them).Footnote ⁷³ Mary Parish was not entirely without connections to the royal court. Her uncle John Tomson was a learned physician and magician who was informed by a spirit guide – a Spanish lady who had been his mistress during life and helped him find buried treasure. Tomson was knighted by Charles II after the king witnessed him walk successfully ‘perfectly on foot without any device or trick over the Thames straight from Whitehall without being any otherwise wet than his feet a little’.Footnote ⁷⁴ There were limits, however, to Charles’s encouragement of the occult sciences, and he did not grant a petition to create a ‘Society of Chymical Physicians’ as a rival to the Royal College of Physicians.Footnote ⁷⁵

The End of Witchcraft?

Witchcraft was still very much accepted as a reality during the Restoration years by both high and low alike, but the scepticism expressed by some during the Interregnum was sowing the seeds of the eventual demise of witchcraft as a felony.Footnote ⁷⁶ During the 1650s, when Puritans were finally in charge and had the opportunity to prosecute witches as they had long wished, no consensus had emerged on a religious settlement for England, and therefore the witch-hunting project failed.Footnote ⁷⁷ In the aftermath of the Civil War and Interregnum, witchcraft allegations were so closely tied to political agendas that judges invariably treated the motives of accusers with suspicion.Footnote ⁷⁸ Many supporters of the established church, especially those who had suffered persecution or exile for their loyalty to Charles II, saw the Restoration as a ‘dispossession’ of the nation from the diabolical influence of Puritanism. The proliferation of witchcraft in the Interregnum was a sign of the spiritual corruption of republicanism; Royalists were consequently reluctant to accept the continuing existence of such beliefs in the post-Restoration world. Furthermore, they associated a preoccupation with witches with the Puritanism they aimed to stamp out.Footnote ⁷⁹ The banishment of witchcraft from the kingdom was a sign of the success of the Restoration.Footnote ⁸⁰

The ritual burning of effigies of Cromwell that followed the Restoration carried with it heavy overtones of counter-magic; in Dorset and Northamptonshire the effigies were even dressed as witches.Footnote ⁸¹ Nevertheless, there was no upsurge of prosecutions of witches in the 1660s. Generally speaking, the association of witchcraft with the Cromwellian regime was understood in metaphorical terms and related to the warning of 1 Samuel 15:23, ‘For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft’. The Protestant dissenters who refused to conform to Charles II’s restored religious settlement became the most vocal advocates of prosecuting actual witches.Footnote ⁸² Furthermore, witchcraft trials spiked at moments of political tension, such as in the immediate aftermath of the Second Conventicle Act (1670), which outlawed the assembly of dissenting congregations.Footnote ⁸³ It is tempting to interpret the proliferation of witchcraft accusations among dissenters as a reaction to the political powerlessness of a community that could only lash out against its own members and its local community as insufficiently godly, since it no longer had an influence over national events.

In the late 1670s, attitudes to witches ‘developed a serious political aura’, as sceptical repudiation of the invisible world became associated with the proponents of the exclusion of the duke of York from the throne, while defences of the reality of witchcraft and magic became associated with the duke’s supporters.Footnote ⁸⁴ It is to the exclusionists and anti-exclusionists that we can trace the factions later known as Whigs and Tories that would come to dominate English politics until the 1730s and, in different forms, even beyond. Any defence of belief in magic could easily be stigmatised as a sign of ultra-conservative Toryism or, worse still, Catholicism. Furthermore, it was at this period that belief in witchcraft was associated specifically, for the first time, with the lower classes and with ignorance, allowing belief in witchcraft to be ridiculed as a rustic superstition.Footnote ⁸⁵ In reality, however, the proponents of exclusion were as keen to look to prophecies and portents as anyone else, and pro-exclusion pamphlets were full of such material.Footnote ⁸⁶

The last accused witches to be executed in England were Temperance Lloyd, Mary Trembles and Susanna Edwards at Exeter on 25 August 1682, although witchcraft trials would continue for many years after that.Footnote ⁸⁷ However, in subsequent English trials the suspects either died before coming to trial, were pardoned after conviction, or were acquitted owing to insufficient evidence. In the 1680s the authorities in Scotland were too busy dealing with Covenanters to worry much about witchcraft, and there was likewise a lull in convictions in England in the 1690s.Footnote ⁸⁸ This was partly a deliberate decision on the part of the judicial authorities: Sir John Holt, Lord Chief Justice 1689–1710, was a Whig who made clear his unbelief in witchcraft and always secured an acquittal from the jury.Footnote ⁸⁹ By 1718 the judge Whitlocke Bulstrode could confidently assure a jury that there was ‘no such practice [as witchcraft] now, blessed be God, within this kingdom’ – a rather ambiguous statement which did not amount to a denial of the existence of witchcraft, but simply asserted (contrary to all evidence) that it no longer existed.Footnote ⁹⁰ Thereafter, commentators and journalists from the early eighteenth century to the twentieth century managed to sound surprised whenever it became clear that ordinary people in Britain still believed in witchcraft and magic, in spite of the abundant and continuing evidence that such belief remained very much alive. Witchcraft beliefs failed to conform to the narrative of ‘civilisation’ and education that befitted the heart of the British Empire, but they nevertheless persisted with or without judicial and legislative sanction.

The notion that the dominance of Newtonian philosophy in and of itself made it impossible for people to believe in witchcraft and magic is unsustainable, since elite belief in witchcraft persisted long after Newton’s mechanical philosophy began to be taught at Oxford and Cambridge. On closer examination, it has become clear that the eighteenth century was far from the ‘age of reason’ that certain vocal writers of the period pretended it to be; one historian has described the eighteenth century as ‘the age of credulousness tempered in places by a combination of curiosity and doubt’.Footnote ⁹¹ Nevertheless, it is fair to say that, after 1688, belief in magic ‘never again attained the intellectual impact or coherence’ of earlier times.Footnote ⁹² The decline of magic as a political force can be attributed partly to political factors that mitigated the impact of belief in magic even where it remained. For example, the Treaty of Union between England and Scotland in 1707 led to the abolition of the Scottish privy council, which had previously played a key role in witch-hunting in Scotland by deciding to prosecute and seek out witches. This did not stop witch trials in Scotland altogether (the last execution of an accused witch in Scotland occurred as late as 1727), but it removed any political impetus to target witches, and discontinued the direct involvement of the government in the process.Footnote ⁹³ Nevertheless, Archbishop Thomas Tenison of Canterbury was aware that Scottish attitudes were significantly different from those in England, and in 1706 he dissuaded Francis Hutchinson from publishing his polemic against witchcraft, An Historical Essay concerning Witchcraft, in case it harmed the chances of political union with Scotland.Footnote ⁹⁴

The Scottish government’s increasing reluctance to prosecute witches in the late seventeenth century can also be linked to the political state of the nation. In 1689, the Scottish Parliament had deposed King James VII and II, offering the throne to William of Orange and his wife Mary (the so-called Claim of Right). William could not claim to rule Scotland by divine right like his Stuart predecessors, and the new king’s close advisor on Scottish affairs, James Johnstone, was sceptical of witch-hunting. When the consent of the Scottish Parliament alone legitimated William’s rule, the new king was without any of the Stuarts’ aura of divine kingship. That divine kingship had been reinforced by righteous witch-hunting, which was no longer needed to serve a legitimating function for the monarchy after 1689.Footnote ⁹⁵ The new Scottish monarchy of the Claim of Right rested on parliamentary rather than legitimist foundations.

Occult Revolutions, 1685–1688

The accession of Charles II’s Catholic brother James II in 1685 alarmed many Protestants who believed the new king was intent on restoring the kingdom to Catholicism. In the months before Charles II’s death on 6 February 1685, the Whig politician Goodwin Wharton (1653–1704) received angelic messages via his lover and medium Mary Parish, warning of the king’s impending death. The angels even instructed Wharton and Mary Parish at one point that they should visit the king in order to encourage him to repent his sins. Wharton believed he had magically acquired healing powers, and was anxious to use them on the king, but the angels cautioned him that Charles was beyond his help.Footnote ⁹⁶

Wharton had been receiving magical advice from Mary Parish since he first met her in 1683. Parish convinced Wharton that she was in contact with a fairy realm under Hounslow Heath known as the ‘Kingdom of the Lowlanders’, and told Wharton that he had been made king of the fairies but could not yet personally rule his realm.Footnote ⁹⁷ Over the years, she produced numerous excuses to explain why Wharton was unable to see or visit the Lowlanders, but he seems never to have lost faith in their existence. Wharton was a serial fantasist whose willingness to believe in the supernatural was as intense as his political ambition. Wharton’s combination of credulity and ambition was not altogether unusual for the period, but there were several moments when Wharton wielded genuine political influence. He constructed an altar in his lodgings where he and Parish performed rituals to summon angels and receive advice from them (although Wharton remained troubled that the voices of the angels always proceeded from the direction of Mary Parish).Footnote ⁹⁸ Wharton’s detailed journals suggest that he was not without intelligence or critical faculties; however, Wharton had invested so much in his beliefs that the ‘will to believe’ usually triumphed over any suspicions he may have had. Reassuringly, by 1686 Wharton found that he was receiving his own visions, and therefore did not have to rely on Parish entirely.Footnote ⁹⁹

Wharton was also an alchemist, and one of his collaborators in this and other occult activities was the old Leveller, John Wildman, who became involved in 1685 with the plot by Charles II’s illegitimate son the duke of Monmouth to invade England and overthrow James II. Wildman, like Wharton, relied on Mary Parish for angelic messages to guide his actions, although he was careful how much he revealed of his treasonous intent. He received his first, vague angelic message on 8 March 1685,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ and hoped Mary Parish’s magic might yet help him find buried treasure that would fund the rebellion. Wildman continued to receive evasive written messages from the angels, but he was not always allowed to open them.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The angels were unwilling to give any definite answer when Wildman asked them about Monmouth’s fate, and as a result Wildman kept his distance from the plot.Footnote ¹⁰²

Wildman was not the only occult practitioner interested in Monmouth’s cause. A government agent in Amsterdam reported that the duke of Monmouth’s sisters were boasting that they were in possession of ‘a Magical Sword which in the Pommel contains such a Potent Talismanic Spell, that when it is once drawn [Monmouth’s] Enemies must have fled before the Bearer’. The maker of the sword was William Boreman, who had once slandered King James by calling him a wizard.Footnote ¹⁰³ An order was issued for Wildman’s arrest even before Monmouth landed in England, but Wildman managed to slip away.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Monmouth’s rebellion was a failure; after landing at Lyme Regis, the duke’s army was decisively beaten by government forces at Sedgemoor in Somerset on 6 July 1685. One card in a set of playing cards printed at the time portrayed ‘Devils in the air bewitching M[onmouth]’s army’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This implied both that Monmouth himself had a belief in magic and that James II might have used magic against the duke – an accusation against James that would return a few years later. Judging by the discovery of paper covered in magical characters found on the duke’s person after his execution, Monmouth did indeed put his faith in the occult.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Wildman remained in hiding while James II’s government rounded up Monmouth’s supporters, until on 9 August the angels summoned by Parish and Wharton advised Wildman to surrender to the king. On this occasion Wildman ignored the angels’ advice and wisely went into exile in the Netherlands;Footnote ¹⁰⁷ James’s lack of clemency in dealing with the rebels would become notorious.

At least one Tory supporter of James II attempted to offer him occult advice, although there is no evidence that James ever took it. Robert Plot (d. 1696), an alchemical physician and former secretary of the Royal Society, drafted a petition to James for the foundation of a college of alchemical physicians or ‘iatrochymists’. The iatrochymists’ struggle against the Royal College of Physicians (which represented traditional Galenic medicine) was a longstanding one; in the 1660s a ‘Poor Man’s Society of Chymical Physitians’ had received an audience with Charles II and received an impressive level of support from the Restoration court, but no letters patent.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ However, Plot’s new petition for a college of iatrochymists was supported by the bizarre claim that an unnamed physician of Plot’s acquaintance had discovered an island called Bensalia while searching for a northeast passage to China. Bensalia was ruled by a philosopher king together with the ‘Sophi’, a society of alchemical physicians. According to Plot, the Sophi showed the unnamed physician ‘a strange sort of Menstruum which was one of the noblest liquors (for the solution of bodies) in the world, being the same or equivalent to that highly valued the grand liquor Alkahest’. This alchemical medicine was the same discovered by Paracelsus and Van Helmont.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Plot’s political intent becomes clear when he claims that the king of Bensalia had written a letter to James in which he explained the governance of the island:

Since Plot described the Sophi as ‘adepts’, the implication was clear; the wealth of the Sophi, and therefore the wealth of Bensalia, derived from alchemy. Plot was offering James an occult solution to the dilemma that had been the undoing of his father Charles I; how was absolute monarchy possible when funds could be raised only by calling parliaments? Plot may have been right in detecting absolutist tendencies in James, but there is no evidence that James ever took Plot’s petition seriously or believed alchemy could solve the Stuart political conundrum.

Meanwhile, in 1687 Goodwin Wharton convinced himself that James II’s queen, Mary of Modena, was in love with him.Footnote ¹¹¹ Wharton believed he was destined to rule England, and that James II would give way to him when the king realised that Wharton was able to father the child that James could not.Footnote ¹¹² He arrived in Bath with the intention of seducing the queen, and came to understand by interior revelation that the queen was being advised of Wharton’s movements by a spirit called Phocas, raised by a conjurer for the king and queen.Footnote ¹¹³ On his return to London, Wharton believed that he was in magical communication with King James via the spirit Phocas, through whom he challenged James to a duel.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Later, Wharton believed he could punish James by sending him headaches, as well as instructing Phocas and the ghost of Charles II to pull the king’s nose.Footnote ¹¹⁵ At the same time, Mary Parish began to believe (likewise by interior revelation) that James II wanted her to run the royal alchemical laboratory, but that James just kept putting off meeting her about it.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Wharton remained convinced, as late as October 1688, that he was ‘a divinely-guided minister’ who could bring peace to England by persuading James II to revert to Protestantism, and still believed that James would raise him to power.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Yet in late 1688 James II fled to France, having failed in his project to implement religious toleration of Catholics and dissenters in England. James’s nephew and son-in-law William of Orange, whose invasion had precipitated James’s flight, was installed as king along with James’s daughter Mary in 1689 at the behest of Parliament. Ironically, Wharton’s supernatural revelations and his indefatigable belief that the king would turn to him for support meant that he took no active part in the Revolution of 1688. Others who shared his politics had long since abandoned hope that James would change his ways and were backing an invasion by the Prince of Orange.

The revolution in government and in the constitution in 1688, which set Parliament above the monarchy, has often been seen as the beginning of modern Britain, nearly coinciding with the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia in 1687, the defining book of the ‘Age of Reason’. Later propaganda smeared the supporters of James II and his successors, the Jacobites, as hopelessly superstitious, while the Whig supporters of William and Mary stood for enlightenment and rationality. Nevertheless, James’s opponents seem to have entertained supernatural beliefs about him prior to William’s invasion, especially the large hat James wore whenever he visited his army’s camp on Hounslow Heath. Some suspected that the hat:

Some went even further, claiming that James’s mysterious popish necromancer had control of the winds and, like John Lowes, had the power to sink William’s fleet.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Similarly, Goodwin Wharton believed that James employed six priests who conjured an adverse wind to keep William of Orange in the Netherlands; it was the priests’ failure to perform their rituals one day that finally allowed William to slip through.Footnote ¹²⁰ Traditional prophecies, often attributed to Nostradamus, were also revived on the Williamite side during the Revolution of 1688, just as they would be in the eighteenth century for the American War of Independence and the French Revolution.Footnote ¹²¹

Goodwin Wharton: The Last Merlin

It seems likely that William III and Mary II were the last reigning British monarchs to be advised by a practising magician. Queen Mary seems even to have been aware of Goodwin Wharton’s esoteric interests. Wharton enjoyed a relationship with William and Mary similar to John Dee’s relationship with Elizabeth I. Both Dee and Wharton considered themselves men of destiny with a great deal to offer the monarchy, yet their opportunities to offer direct advice were sporadic. Both men’s perception of their relationship with the monarch did not always correspond with reality, and both had a tendency to inflate the significance of their counsels. Wharton resembled Dee in other ways, too, receiving communications from angels, experimenting with alchemy, and repeatedly searching for buried treasure that never materialised. Furthermore, although Wharton’s relationship with his medium Mary Parish was sexual, in other ways it resembled the association of John Dee with Edward Kelley, and both Dee and Wharton might be seen as the victims of elaborate and extended confidence tricks. Wharton, however, lived at what was perhaps the last historical moment when someone could simultaneously inhabit the world of high politics and the world of magic and fairy belief without being considered insane.

Wharton’s relationship with the future monarchs began in December 1688, when he was invited to advise the prince of Orange on establishing a new government. Wharton repeatedly asked Mary Parish to channel messages from God and the fairies in order to guide him.Footnote ¹²² After William proved largely indifferent to Wharton’s advice, Wharton turned to Queen Mary and, as with Mary of Modena, became convinced that the queen was in love with him. The angels who communicated with Mary Parish reported that William would soon die and Mary would raise Wharton ‘to eminence’.Footnote ¹²³ Wharton had the opportunity to advise Mary directly in the summer of 1690, and agonised over whether he should tell her about a Jacobite plot revealed to him by the angels. Then, after the defeat of the English navy at the battle of Beachy Head on 1 July 1690, Wharton drew on his alchemical skills to begin assembling a device ‘for launching great stars and darts of fire’ with the help of the angels and an assistant named Milford. Wharton also hoped for help from the fairies, asking them to make him a magical diving suit so he could disable the rudders of French ships and a mortar that could hurl fireballs at the enemy. Wharton even hoped that the fairies might sneak aboard French vessels and pour water on their gunpowder.Footnote ¹²⁴

On 25 July, Wharton obtained another audience with Queen Mary and spoke to her about the magical forces that had opposed the revolution, including James II’s dabbling in black magic and the priests who conjured a contrary wind against William’s fleet. The queen, according to Wharton, received these revelations positively.Footnote ¹²⁵ Wharton was unable to secure another private interview with the queen but managed to give her a written account of his revelations, noting in his diary that he thought the queen was ‘really touched and convinced by them’.Footnote ¹²⁶ Although we cannot be certain that Mary ever read Wharton’s document, the fact that she did not banish him from court on discovering his bizarre beliefs suggests that she was at least prepared to tolerate them.

Although it seems to have had nothing to do with Wharton’s influence, William’s new government was responsible for repealing Henry IV’s act against alchemists, which was replaced in August 1689 by a new act that encouraged the extraction of metal from ores (a key aim of the alchemists). The pioneering chemist Robert Boyle enthusiastically welcomed the repeal as an endorsement of alchemy.Footnote ¹²⁷ The new climate of openness to alchemy was reflected in the appointment of Isaac Newton as Warden of the Royal Mint in the Tower of London in 1696, not long after he claimed to have discovered an alchemical process which would ‘multiply to infinity’.Footnote ¹²⁸ No medieval monarch had ever gone so far as to put an alchemist in charge of the mint. Nevertheless, it was undeniable that alchemy was in decline. This was not because it had been refuted by scientific discoveries, but because the secrecy of alchemy was out of step with a Whig political culture that discouraged ‘cunning’ and secrecy as traits of the Jacobite enemy.Footnote ¹²⁹ Furthermore, the spread of print made it possible for anyone who could read to learn what were formerly secrets revealed only to acolytes in various arts and crafts.Footnote ¹³⁰

The post-revolutionary period also witnessed the final flowering of English astrology. Astrological almanacs had been a key source of propaganda during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–83. Poor Robin’s Almanac abused the Protestant dissenters who supported exclusion, and the Tory astrologer John Gadbury was so hated he was burnt in effigy by Whig protestors.Footnote ¹³¹ In 1680, the bishop of Norwich remarked that astrology ‘lies in the midway between magic and imposture’,Footnote ¹³² suggesting that critics of astrology were now as likely to regard it as fraudulent as morally impermissible. Publication of learned speculations on the nature of astrology declined after 1688, although almanacs remained popular. The astrologer John Partridge, an ardent Whig who returned from exile after the revolution, maintained traditional astrological methods – to the point where he stubbornly rejected Copernican heliocentrism, by then virtually universally accepted. Partridge’s rival, the pro-Jacobite John Gadbury, embraced a heliocentric universe with equal fervour.Footnote ¹³³

Partridge accused Gadbury, a convert to Catholicism, of having changed his coat many times, saying that Gadbury had been a Ranter, a supporter of Cromwell, and then a Tory. Gadbury accused Partridge of being a secret republican who disparaged the memories of Charles I and Archbishop Laud.Footnote ¹³⁴ Similarly, Partridge attacked the almanac writer George Parker as ‘a broken Jacobite cutler’ and a conjurer.Footnote ¹³⁵ Partridge’s relentless politicisation of astrology, combined with his dominance of the market and his outdated views of the solar system, inevitably damaged the reputation of what had once been esteemed a noble art.Footnote ¹³⁶ Nevertheless, Partridge’s clients included the leading Tory politicians Robert Harley and Henry St John, presumably because, in spite of his political views, Partridge still had the reputation of London’s leading astrologer.Footnote ¹³⁷

The political term ‘cabal’, which derived from the Hebrew Kabbalah and referred to a secret group seeking to hold onto power, originally retained some of its mystical significance in Charles II’s reign. In 1676, the Royalist newspaper Poor Robin’s Intelligencer satirically reported that the ‘Green ribbon’d cabal’ (the Green Ribbon Club, whose members would go on to form the core of the Whig party) was meeting with Rosicrucians, alchemists and Freemasons.Footnote ¹³⁸ However, this is unlikely to have been intended as an accusation that the members of the Green Ribbon Club were actually interested in the occult – rather, it was mockery of political clubs and their pretensions to secrecy and exclusivity. The so-called Cabal ministry governed between 1668 and 1674, a group characterised by its close-knit secrecy (as well as by the fact that the initial letters of the leading ministers spelled the word ‘cabal’).

In addition to the turn away from political secrecy that followed the 1688 revolution, there was also pressure on magicians to demonstrate the claims of occult philosophy by empirical experimentation. The materialism of Thomas Hobbes and the eagerness of orthodox establishment authors such as Joseph Glanvill to uphold the reality of the spiritual world by means of evidence created a climate that pushed occultists like Boyle and Newton towards something resembling the methods of modern science.Footnote ¹³⁹ It helped that occultists had always been willing to draw their conclusions from ‘experiments’ rather than from the authority of ancient authors such as Aristotle and Galen, so defying the ancients came more easily to natural philosophers schooled in magic than to anyone else. As early as the sixteenth century, individuals like Dee and Humphrey Gilbert who rejected Scholastic philosophy’s authoritarian approach to knowledge had opted for the direct revelation promised by ritual magic. Although the Royal Society (founded in 1660) distanced itself from ‘speculative’ subjects such as alchemy, it did so because the occult smacked of the ‘enthusiasm’ associated with the sectaries of the Interregnum rather than because the occult was ‘unscientific’. Many early fellows of the Royal Society were private practitioners of magic.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Throughout 1693 Mary Parish repeatedly prophesied that William would soon die and Wharton would be offered preferment by Queen Mary.Footnote ¹⁴¹ In February 1694, Wharton received a commission as a lieutenant colonel and was promised by Parish that he would be a full colonel and general within nine months. Parish insisted that Wharton would ‘overcome the enemy’ in the English assault on Brest on 7 June 1694.Footnote ¹⁴² When the attack failed, Wharton rationalised the prophecy as having been conditional on his courage, which he failed to show by not joining the landing troops. However, when Wharton returned to England, Mary Parish explained that it was the commanders’ change of plan that had altered Wharton’s destiny.Footnote ¹⁴³

Queen Mary contracted smallpox towards the end of 1694, and Wharton attempted to save her by invoking the angels with whom Mary Parish claimed to communicate. They gave evasive answers, with the archangel Gabriel announcing that he retained ‘great hopes’ for the queen’s recovery just three hours before she died.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ After Mary’s death, William showed some favour to Wharton, which Wharton believed was due to ‘secret papers’ about fairies and angels, given to her by Wharton, that William found among Mary’s papers.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ For whatever reason, by August 1697 William had appointed Wharton a Lord of the Admiralty. Wharton made use of Parish’s magical advice in an attempt to predict the outcome of a proposed attack on the fleet of the French privateer, Jean Bart in the port of Dunkirk. Parish had a vision of burning ships, which corroborated Wharton’s plan to attack the French with fire ships. However, in the event an electrical storm prevented Wharton from even reaching the English fleet.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

King William’s death on 8 March 1702 placed the youngest daughter of James II, Anne, on the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland. Wharton was convinced that he had a magical hold over Anne, as he had had over her sister Queen Mary, and instructed Mary Parish to prepare ‘a paper inscribed with a magic love formula’ for him to carry on his person when in the presence of the new queen. Finally, in October 1702, Wharton received a vision to the effect that Prince George of Denmark, Queen Anne’s husband, would shortly die, leaving Anne free to marry Wharton.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Although Mary Parish died not long after this, Wharton remained convinced that the queen was in love with him, and even contemplated declaring his love in January 1704.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Wharton died on 25 October 1704, apparently committed to his political fantasies to the last.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Queen Anne continued to touch for the king’s evil, partly in order to emphasise her right to rule instead of her half-brother James Edward, the son of James II and Mary of Modena. However, as concerns grew that the rite might be seen as magical, the liturgy that accompanied the ceremony was drastically revised. The cutting of Belinda’s hair in Alexander Pope’s poem The Rape of the Lock has been interpreted as a comment on the loss of the magical power of monarchy in Anne’s reign.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The queen favoured the Tories throughout much of her reign, yet many Tories tolerated Anne’s rule in the hope that the legitimate monarch, James Edward Stuart, would be restored on her death. Instead, Parliament installed George, elector of Hanover as king in 1714, an act that definitively established Britain as a constitutional monarchy under parliamentary sovereignty. George discontinued the practice of royal touching, but discussion of the royal touch continued, with doctors concluding in the 1720s that any healings that took place should be ascribed to suggestion.Footnote ¹⁵¹ The liturgy for royal touching even continued to appear in some prayer books into the reign of George II, in spite of the fact that no Hanoverian monarch ever performed the ceremony, as a last lingering vestige of the English monarchy’s belief in its magical power.Footnote ¹⁵²

Conclusion

Although it is undoubtedly the case that occult traditions declined in political significance between 1649 and 1714, the nature and causes of this decline have frequently been misunderstood. Public and elite adoption of ‘scientific’ scepticism during the period played a meagre role, although a strand of scepticism regarding occult claims had existed in Britain since the work of Reginald Scot in the 1580s. Religious and political radicals and Whigs who might have been expected to oppose occult beliefs were often just as preoccupied with the occult as their conservative opponents. The committed Whig Goodwin Wharton, as an advisor to William and Mary who in turn took his advice from conjured angels, stood at the end of a long line of royal supernatural counsellors that, in legend at least, stretched back to Merlin.

In reality, it was not the triumph of a ‘scientific’ worldview but the relentless politicisation of occult claims that diminished their influence during the period. The overuse of witchcraft as a political metaphor during and after the Civil War meant that accusations of witchcraft came to be associated with political instability and religious ‘enthusiasm’. As witchcraft and witchcraft-belief became politically toxic, an uncomfortable reminder of a sectarian past best forgotten, legislators and jurists were unwilling to engage with them. Since many supernatural beliefs were lumped together with witchcraft as ‘superstition’, the demise of witchcraft had an impact on learned magical practices as well. In spite of the Williamite regime’s support for alchemy, interest in the subject dried up, and political infighting brought discredit to astrology. Like belief in witchcraft, astrological prognostications remained popular among ordinary people. Yet elite interest in astrology – and therefore its political importance – largely disappeared. With the discontinuation of royal touching on the death of the last reigning Stuart monarch, the monarchy’s last vestige of magic vanished as well. Yet, as the next chapter will show, occult traditions would remain entwined with politics into the eighteenth, nineteenth and even twentieth centuries.