346 
JAMES NAYLER. 
receiving nothing ; before the arrival of the messenger, he applied to 
speaker Lenthal, always his friend, who pointed out the olfensive 
passages, which he immediately altered ; and attended the committee 
next morning with six copies printed, which six alone he acknowledged 
to be his. By this trick he escaped, after having been only detained 
thirteen days in custody of the sergeant at arms. This year he was 
engaged in a dispute with Mr. Thomas Gataker, and, before the expi- 
ration of the year, he lost his second wife, to his great joy, and mar- 
ried a third in October following. In 1655 he was indicted at Hicks’s- 
hall, for giving judgment upon stolen goods, but acquitted ; and, in 
1659, he received, from the king of Sweden, a present of a gold chain 
and medal, worth above 50l. on account of his having mentioned that 
monarch with great respect in his almanacks of 1657 and 1658. 
After the restoration, in 1660, being taken into custody, and examin- 
ed by a committee of the house of commons, touching the execution 
of Charles I., he declared, that Robert Spairn, then secretary to Crom- 
well, dining with him soon after the fact, assured him it was done b}^ 
cornet Joyce. This year he sued out his pardon under the great seal 
of England, and continued in London till 1665; when, on the appear- 
ance of the plague, he retired to his estate at Horsham. Here he 
applied himself lo the study of physic, having, by means of his friend 
Elias Ashraole, procured from archbishop Sheldon a license to prac- 
tise it ; and from October 1670, he exercised both the faculties of 
physic and astrology till his death, which was occasioned by a para- 
lytic stroke, in 1681, at Horsham. He was interred in the chancel 
of the church at Walton, and a black marble stone, with a Latin 
inscription, was paced over his grave, soon after, by Mr. Ashmole, 
at whose request also. Dr. Smabridge, bishop of Bristol, then a scholar 
at Westminster-school, wrote a Latin and English elegy on his death, 
both which are annexed to the history of our author’s life and times, 
from which this memoir is extracted. 
Lilly, a little before his death, adopted one Henry Coley, a 
tailor, for his son, by the name of Merlin Junior, and made him a pre- 
sent of the copyright, or good will, of his almanack, which had been 
printed six-and-thirty years successively ; and Coley carried it on for 
some time. Lilly bequeathed his estate at Horsham to one of the 
sons of his friend and patron Bulstrode Whitelock ; and his magical 
utensils came into the hands of Dr. Case, his successor, of facetious 
memory. — Lilly was author of many works. 
James Nayler, 
An English Quaker in the seventeenth century, was remarkable 
both on account of the extravagance of the delusions which for some 
time possessed him and his followers, and the excessive severity of the 
punishment which was inflicted upon him. He was the son of an 
industrious little farmer, who supported his family by the cultivation 
of his own estate ; and was born in the parish of Ardsley, near Wake- 
field in Yorkshire, about the year 1616. He had a good natural 
capacity, and was taught to read and write his native tongue with 
correctness. About the age of tw enty-tw'o he married, and removed 
