Odd this day
So, happy 472nd anniversary of the birth of Simon Forman: astrologer, occultist, quack, dirty sod who had erotic dreams about Elizabeth I and married a teenager when in his 40s, and man who predicted his own death – accurately – but still managed to be accused of involvement in a murder four years later.
knowledge of all wares and drugs and howe to buy and selle. [He] grue soe apte and had such good fortune that in shorte tyme his master committed all to his charge.
Most of all, he was resourceful. When his master took his books away because he didn’t like young Simon studying Latin in his spare time (presumably to prevent him moving on to better things), Simon employed a schoolboy who lodged in the same house to teach him by night everything the kid learned during the day. This allowed Forman to… well, move on to better things. He became a schoolmaster, and started studying — and then practising:
astronomy, physic, magic, philosophy, and surgery ‘wherein he profited and professed mightily’.
This got him into trouble. He wasn’t qualified to give people medical treatment, let alone operate on them — and the magic was somewhat taboo, too. So he spent a fair bit of time going in and out of prison, moving around the country, and indulging in shenanigans. One paragraph in particular of his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography stands out:
Only in London at the age of 40 (in 1592) did his life begin to settle down a little — and it was all thanks to catching the plague. Or so he said. He was certainly very ill for 21 weeks, and
cured himself by lancing his boils and taking a special drink. Having discovered this method, Forman used it to cure others of the plague, and thereby established a strong reputation as a medical practitioner. He soon began to clear his debts.
Soon his “astrological medical practice” was very healthy indeed. Between 1596 and 1603, he saw up to 2,000 patients a year — and in the last few years the University of Cambridge has unveiled the results of a decade of work to decipher his almost entirely illegible notes.
The idea was that you would go and see him, tell him what was wrong, and he would do your horoscope for the exact moment at which you told him. He would then prescribe something –
mainly purges, fortifying brews or bloodletting
…according to Lauren Kassell, Professor of History of Science and Medicine at Cambridge, and leader of the project to digitise Forman’s records. He could, apparently, use the stars to diagnose illnesses, but also to stop hauntings and help find lost hawks. There is some fascinating detail in the sheer variety of people and symptoms he ‘treated’.
…and as the Guardian notes:
So, one might be forgiven for thinking that his prescriptions can’t possibly have helped. Purges — which, in Kassell’s delicate phrasing, worked “upwards or downwards” — caused you to expel… substances from your body, which (well, of course) restored the balance of your ‘humours’. There were also leeches (obviously), but how about the touch of a dead man’s hand? Or pigeon slippers?
a pigon slitt & applied to the sole of each foote
Thinking bad thoughts was obviously a sign of witchcraft or demonic visitation, so there were counter-spells for sale, too — “incantations, sigils or blessed amulets”.
Jeremy Beadle, in his not always reliable Today’s The Day!, says
his most astounding cure was that of Sir Barrington Molyns, who was suffering from a nasty attack of ‘stinking sweet and venomous worms’ up his nose. Forman diagnosed demons — obviously — and gave the man some demonifuge and a quick rub down with some heavy stones. This produced a loud ringing in his ears, and convinced him the demons were leaving. Stage two of the treatment was to immerse the patient head first in a stagnant pond full of frogs at midnight, and the most amazing thing of all is — it worked.
But there is an intriguing detail in how Kassell talks about his bedside manner:
She argues that just the opportunity to discuss your problem was likely part of the astrologers’ appeal for many. “The approach taken by Forman and Napier may have worked as a form of proto-therapy. For example, many women talked openly about their sex lives and fertility fears.”
So, it seems that what Forman really was was an early homeopath. He prescribed a load of old crap, but because his patients were paying (handsomely), he had time to sit and listen to them first. Someone was taking their strange symptoms seriously.
Mind you, he may have listened to his female patients, but he did also try to get into their pants (and not without success). He was, to use the proper term, a notorious shagger. One of his patients was Amelia Lanier (who may have been the Dark Lady figure in some of Shakespeare’s sonnets, although there are plenty of other candidates). When she consulted him, her husband was away, and — according to A. L. Rowse in his 1974 book, Sex and Society in Shakespeare’s age — Forman wrote in his notes that
A certain man longed to see a gentle-woman whom he loved and desired to halek with
You may be wondering, and not unreasonably, what ‘halek’ means. Let’s delve a little further and see if context will help us…
She was familiar and friendly to him in all things, but only she would not halek.
Hmmm.
Yet he felt all parts of her body willingly and kissed her often, but she would not do in any wise.
I mean, I think I’ve grasped it. Anyway, he may not have got everything he wanted in that case, but he certainly put it about, and wrote in his notebook about the saucy Elizabeth I dream he had…
I dreamt that I was with the Queen, and that she was a little elderly woman in a coarse white petticoat all unready … we came over a great close where were many people … a tall man with a reddish beard, distract of his wits. She talked to him and he spoke very merrily unto her, and at last did take her and kiss her. So I took her by the arm and put her away; and told her the fellow was frantic. And … then we went through a dirty lane. She had a long white smock, very clean and fair, and it trailed in the dirt and her coat behind … I told her she should do me a favour to let me wait on her, and she said I should. Then, said I: ‘I mean to wait upon you, and not under you, that I might make this belly a little bigger to carry up this smock and coats out of the dirt.’ And so we talked merrily and then she began to lean upon me, when we were past the dirt, and to be very familiar with me, and methought she began to love me. And when we were alone, out of sight, methought she would have kissed me.
Rowse says of this that you don’t have to be Freud to interpret it, and… I think we can agree he has a point. (The “tall man with a reddish beard” is thought to be Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who was indeed ‘close’ to the queen.)
In 1599, at the age of 46, Forman married Anne (or Joan) Baker, 16-year-old niece of Sir Edward Monnings, but otherwise his life continued much as before. He continued to get in trouble with the medical establishment, occasionally being fined or imprisoned. He challenged the College of Physicians to a debate in 1603, and (ODNB again):
The college declined, and Forman interpreted this as an acknowledgement of his superior judgement. In another attempt to end the confrontations Forman went to Jesus College, Cambridge … and obtained a doctorate in physic and astronomy and a licence to practise medicine … The physicians remained unappeased, and made several further attempts to curtail his activities.
He died on Thursday 8 September 1611, and William Lilly’s 1715 work, Mr William Lilly’s history of his life and times, recounts what the widowed Anne/Joan told him about it. Apparently, she’d asked him which of them would die first, and his response was that she would bury him the following Thursday. He was absolutely fine for three days, during which she made fun of his inaccurate prophecy. Unfortunately (ODNB again),
on Thursday after dinner he took a boat at Southwark to cross the Thames to Puddle Dock, and having rowed into midstream, fell down dead. A storm arose immediately after his death.
Then, two years later, Sir Thomas Overbury was poisoned by his ex-boyfriend’s (by then the king’s boyfriend’s) wife because he wrote a poem she didn’t like.
Lady Frances Howard, countess of Essex, and her friend Anne Turner, who were convicted of his murder a couple of years after that, had both been patients of Forman’s. During Howard’s trial, it was alleged that Forman had provided Howard
with magical means of estranging her husband, Robert Devereux, and winning the affections of the king’s erstwhile favourite, Robert Carr. Since then, Forman has been variously remembered as a quack, agent of the devil, womaniser, pioneering astrologer, and voice of his age.
All of this is probably why Rowse’s is not the only book about him. There was a good (Lisa Jardine) review of two biographies of him in 2001, and there’s even a video game, Astrologaster, in which you play as Forman and try to win him that elusive medical licence.
I may have to track one of his biographies down. He may have been a charlatan, and (like so many of his ilk) have taken sexual advantage of his charisma and power, but he wasn’t boring.
