Wellwood adds, “It is said that King Charles seemed concerned at the accident, and that the Lord Falkland, observing it, would also try his own fortune in the same way, hoping that he might fall on some passage that could have no relation to his case, and thereby divert the King’s thoughts from any impression that the other had made on him; but the place that Lord Falkland stumbled upon was yet more suited to his destiny than the other had been to the King’s, being the expression of Evander upon the untimely death of his son Pallas, as thus translated by Dryden:—
“O Pallas! thou hast fail’d thy plighted word,
To fight with caution, nor to tempt the sword.
I warned thee but in vain; for well I knew
What perils youthful ardour will pursue;
That boiling blood would carry thee too far,
Young as thou wert in dangers, raw to war!
O curst essay of arms, disastrous doom,
Preludes of bloody fields, and fights to come!”
It is generally admitted, however, that Charles was very superstitious; and we are told by Lilly, the astrologer, that the King on more than one occasion sent to consult him during his misfortunes. It may be remembered, too, that Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I., consulted a prophetess—Lady Eleanor, daughter of the Earl of Castlehaven, and married to Sir John Davys, the King’s Attorney-General. The idea that she was a prophetess arose from the discovery that the letters of her name, twisted into an anagram, might thus be read: “Reveal, O Daniel.” But her prophetic pride had on one occasion a rebuff; for one of the King’s Privy Council attacked her with her own weapons, maintaining that the real anagram should be read thus: “Dame Eleanor Davys—Never so mad a lady.”
But the strange conversation that passed between her Majesty Henrietta Maria and the prophetess is thus given in the latter’s own words: “About two years after the marriage of King Charles I., I was waiting on the Queen as she came from mass or evening service, to know what service she was pleased to require from me. Her first question was ‘Whether she should ever have a son?’ I answered, ‘In a short time.’ The Queen was next desirous to know what would be the destiny of the Duke of Buckingham and the English fleet, which had sailed to attack her brother’s realm, and relieve the siege of Rochelle.
“I answered that the Duke of Buckingham would bring home little honour, but his person would return safely, and that speedily. The Queen then returned to her hopes of a son, and I showed that she would have one, and that for a long time she should be happy.
“‘But for how long?’ asked the Queen. ‘For sixteen years,’ was my reply. King Charles coming in at that moment, our discourse was interrupted by him. ‘How now, Lady Eleanor,’ said the King, ‘are not you the person who foretold your husband’s death three days before it happened?’ to which his Majesty thought fit to add, ‘that it was the next to breaking his heart.’”
Mary II., having heard that a Mrs. Wise, a noted fortune-teller, had prophesied that James II. would be restored, and that the Duke of Norfolk would lose his head, went in person to her to hear what she had to say regarding her own future destiny. But this witch-woman was a perverse Jacobite, and positively refused to read futurity for her Majesty.
George I. had been warned by a French prophetess to take care of his wife, as it was fated that he would not survive her more than a year. Such an effect, it is said, had the prediction on his mind, that shortly after his wife’s death, on taking leave of his son and the Princess of Wales, when on the eve of his departure for Hanover, he told them that he should never see them again. “At the same time,” adds Mr. Jesse,[178] “with a contempt of all laws, human and divine, he gave directions that his wife’s will should be burnt, and this for the mere purpose, it seems, of depriving his own son of some valuable legacies bequeathed to him by his unfortunate mother”—his wife and his only son having, it would appear, been the two persons whom he most disliked.
Divination by cards was in the seventeenth century a fashionable amusement at the Court of France. A well-known anecdote tells of the ominous gloom which was on one occasion cast over the circle of Anne of Austria by the obstinacy with which the knave of spades—the sure emblem of a speedy death—persisted in falling to the lot of the young and brilliant Duc de Candale: a prediction which was shortly afterwards verified.
The superstitious fancy of the “divinity that hedges in a king,” and made Cæsar encourage his alarmed boatman, “Fear nothing, you carry Cæsar and the fortune of Cæsar in your boat,” is told of Rufus, who, when the sailors pointed out the danger of putting to sea, exclaimed: “I have never heard of a king who was shipwrecked; weigh anchor, and you will see that the winds will be with us.”