Mr. William Lilly's History of His Life and Times, From the Year 1602, to 1681

William Lilly wrote his own life story in 1668, in his sixty-sixth year, as a letter to his friend and fellow antiquarian Elias Ashmole, and it was published from the manuscript only in 1715, after both men had died. It is the primary source for the best documented episode of Lilly's career: his summons before a House of Commons committee on 25 October 1666, weeks after the Great Fire of London, to explain hieroglyphic images he had published in 1651 that were by then being read as having predicted it. Lilly records that he admitted making the images but denied having known in advance what dates they concerned, and that the committee released him. As Lilly's own retrospective account of his own defence it is a firsthand record and, for the same reason, not an independent one; it is read here alongside Ann Geneva's modern scholarly study rather than in place of it.