Here Five Foot deep lyes on his back
A Cobler, Starmonger, and Quack,
Who to the Stars in pure Good-will,
Does to his best look upward still.
A Cobler, Starmonger, and Quack,
Who to the Stars in pure Good-will,
Does to his best look upward still.
(From Swift's 'epitaph' to
Partridge)
John Partridge was a
leading astrologer of the early 18th Century - a period when astrology was
sliding into disrepute. Rejected by the scientific establishment of the Age of
Reason, it became fair game for ridicule by the wits and satirists of the day.
In 1708 Dean Jonathan Swift, best known now as the author of Gulliver's Travels, perpetrated an
elaborate hoax at Partridge's expense.
Poor old Partridge had the misfortune to cross Dean Swift, partly for reasons of his political allegiance, partly because Swift had a poor view of astrologers in general, and partly because he was annoyed by the astrologer's attacks upon the church. Under the assumed name of Isaac Bickerstaff, Swift issued his own almanac to rival Partridge's Merlinus Liberatus.
His predictions for the year 1708 are prefaced by a condemnation of..."mean illiterate traders between us and the stars". He names Partridge and Gadbury, whose.. ."nonsense and folly are offered to the world as genuine from the planets, though they descend from no greater height than their own brains". He condemns the pretensions, the learning and even the literacy of those named and offers himself as a true practitioner.
My first prediction
relates to Partridge the almanack-maker. I have consulted the star of his
nativity, and find that he will infallibly die upon the night of 29th of March
next, about eleven at night, of a raging fever: therefore I advise him to
consider of it, and settle his affairs in time.
The pamphlet continues with a series of predictions. It was apparently taken seriously enough to be burned by the Inquisition in Portugal, according to the ambassador of the time. Swift kept the jest running around town by next publishing - as 'a Person of Quality' - a critical account of 'Bickerstaff's' predictions, and challenging Partridge to refute them.
Word of Bickerstaff’s pamphlet quickly spread across London.
Although astrologers, Partridge among them, were notorious for predicting the
deaths of notable people each year, none dared to name a specific timeframe—or
to target one of their own. The almanac reached far enough to be read and
burned by the Portuguese Inquisition, while Partridge fanned the flames with a
harshly-written reply to Bickerstaff. It read in part: “His whole design was
nothing but Deceit, / The End of March will plainly show the Cheat.” Some
wondered if the entire commotion was a joke by Bickerstaff, but the motivation
for such a thing was hard to imagine—if he were false, he would be exposed and
forgotten in just a few short weeks. In the meantime, all of London sat in
anticipation.
And incredibly, on the 30th of March, word of Partridge did
indeed arrive. A letter written to an unnamed lord and titled “The
Accomplishment of the First of Mr. Bickerstaff’s Predictions” began to
circulate around the city. In it, an anonymous man “employed in the Revenue”
reported sitting at Partridge’s bedside on the evening of March 29. Partridge,
he recalled, had fallen ill some three days earlier and was by then beyond
hope. In his final hours, he had confessed to being a fraud and named
Bickerstaff’s prediction as the self-fulfilling prophesy that had put him in
this state. Finally, he had succumbed to his fever at 7:05 PM—just four hours
off the time predicted by Bickerstaff.
The content of the letter (it is short, so I will publish it
in full):
My Lord,
In obedience to your
Lordship’s commands, as well as to satisfy my own curiosity, I have for some
days past enquired constantly after Partridge the almanack-maker, of whom it
was foretold in Mr. Bickerstaff’s predictions, publish’d about a month ago,
that he should die on the 29th instant about eleven at night of a raging fever.
I had some sort of knowledge of him when I was employ’d in the Revenue, because
he used every year to present me with his almanack, as he did other gentlemen,
upon the score of some little gratuity we gave him. I saw him accidentally once
or twice about ten days before he died, and observed he began very much to
droop and languish, tho’ I hear his friends did not seem to apprehend him in
any danger. About two or three days ago he grew ill, and was confin’d first to
his chamber, and in a few hours after to his bed, where Dr. Case and Mrs.
Kirleus were sent for to visit, and to prescribe to him. Upon this intelligence
I sent thrice every day one servant or other to enquire after his health; and
yesterday, about four in the afternoon, word was brought me that he was past
hopes: Upon which, I prevailed with myself to go and see him, partly out of
commiseration, and I confess, partly out of curiosity. He knew me very well,
seem’d surpriz’d at my condescension, and made me compliments upon it as well
as he could, in the condition he was. The people about him said, he had been
for some time delirious; but when I saw him, he had his understanding as well
as ever I knew, and spake strong and hearty, without any seeming uneasiness or
constraint. After I told him how sorry I was to see him in those melancholy
circumstances, and said some other civilities, suitable to the occasion, I
desired him to tell me freely and ingeniously, whether the predictions Mr.
Bickerstaff had publish’d relating to his death, had not too much affected and
worked on his imagination. He confess’d he had often had it in his head, but
never with much apprehension, till about a fortnight before; since which time
it had the perpetual possession of his mind and thoughts, and he did verily
believe was the true natural cause of his present distemper: For, said he, I am
thoroughly persuaded, and I think I have very good reasons, that Mr.
Bickerstaff spoke altogether by guess, and knew no more what will happen this
year than I did myself. I told him his discourse surprized me; and I would be
glad he were in a state of health to be able to tell me what reason he had to
be convinc’d of Mr. Bickerstaff’s ignorance. He reply’d, I am a poor ignorant
fellow, bred to a mean trade, yet I have sense enough to know that all
pretences of foretelling by astrology are deceits, for this manifest reason,
because the wise and the learned, who can only know whether there be any truth
in this science, do all unanimously agree to laugh at and despise it; and none
but the poor ignorant vulgar give it any credit, and that only upon the word of
such silly wretches as I and my fellows, who can hardly write or read. I then
asked him why he had not calculated his own nativity, to see whether it agreed
with Bickerstaff’s prediction? at which he shook his head, and said, Oh! sir,
this is no time for jesting, but for repenting those fooleries, as I do now
from the very bottom of my heart. By what I can gather from you, said I, the
observations and predictions you printed, with your almanacks, were mere
impositions on the people. He reply’d, if it were otherwise I should have the
less to answer for. We have a common form for all those things, as to
foretelling the weather, we never meddle with that, but leave it to the
printer, who takes it out of any old almanack, as he thinks fit; the rest was
my own invention, to make my almanack sell, having a wife to maintain, and no
other way to get my bread; for mending old shoes is a poor livelihood; and,
(added he, sighing) I wish I may not have done more mischief by my physick than
my astrology; tho’ I had some good receipts from my grandmother, and my own
compositions were such as I thought could at least do no hurt.
I had some other
discourse with him, which now I cannot call to mind; and I fear I have already
tired your Lordship. I shall only add one circumstance, That on his death-bed
he declared himself a Nonconformist, and had a fanatick preacher to be his
spiritual guide. After half an hour’s conversation I took my leave, being half
stifled by the closeness of the room. I imagine he could not hold out long, and
therefore withdrew to a little coffee-house hard by, leaving a servant at the
house with orders to come immediately, and tell me, as near as he could, the
minute when Partridge should expire, which was not above two hours after; when,
looking upon my watch, I found it to be above five minutes after seven; by which
it is clear that Mr. Bickerstaff was mistaken almost four hours in his
calculation. In the other circumstances he was exact enough. But whether he has
not been the cause of this poor man’s death, as well as the predictor, may be
very reasonably disputed. However, it must be confess’d the matter is odd
enough, whether we should endeavour to account for it by chance, or the effect
of imagination: For my own part, tho’ I believe no man has less faith in these
matters, yet I shall wait with some impatience, and not without some
expectation, the fulfilling of Mr. Bickerstaff’s second prediction, that the
Cardinal de Noailles is to die upon the fourth of April, and if that should be
verified as exactly as this of poor Partridge, I must own I should be wholly surprized,
and at a loss, and should infallibly expect the accomplishment of all the rest.
The news left London in a state of shock and wonder. At the
same moment it had lost one of its oldest and most respected almanac writers,
the city had gained what was surely the first indisputably genuine astrologer
in history. The implications were staggering.
It’s likely that no one was as surprised to hear the news as
John Partridge. For Partridge, as it happened, was alive and well, having spent
the night of March 29 smugly celebrating his victory over the fraud Isaac
Bickerstaff. Word of his death became widespread on the morning of April 1,
making it apparent that Partridge had been the victim of one of history’s
grandest All Fools’ Day pranks.
But Partridge’s ordeal was only beginning. It’s reported
that he woke up the morning of his death to the sound of the church bell
announcing his passing. Before long, he was visited by an undertaker looking to
prepare his home, and later by the church sexton seeking orders for the funeral
sermon. Throughout the day a string of mourners, funeral workers, and church
officials were shooed from the cobbler’s door.
It wasn’t difficult to piece together what had happened. The
letter announcing Partridge’s death had, of course, been written by Isaac
Bickerstaff himself—as he had planned to do from the very start. But this one
authentic-sounding account was more than enough to convince London of the news.
Partridge’s name was removed from the Stationer’s Register—making him essentially
legally dead—and crowds of his fans held vigils outside his home. Meanwhile,
Partridge’s published responses asserting his continued functioning went
largely ignored. The public had decided he was dead, and the words of a dead
man obviously couldn’t be trusted.
Some Londoners seemed to genuinely believe the good
astrologer was deceased, while others merely reveled in tormenting him;
Partridge would frequently be stopped on the street for inquiries into how his
widow was coping, or to be chided for lacking the decency to be properly
buried. The old astrologer had no shortage of enthusiastic enemies willing to
perpetuate the myth of his death, and the more literarily inclined among
them—some the past victims of Partridge’s own predictions—set about printing
additional denials and confirmations of his passing, adding to the confusion.
Some of these forgeries were released under Partridge’s own name, making it
difficult to separate his genuine protests from the comically-enhanced accounts
of his imposters.
What is clear is that the hoax plagued Partridge for the
rest of his life. As a preface to all of his future public dealings he would
invariably need to argue—sometimes unsuccessfully—that he was the real
John Partridge and that he wasn’t dead. Even among those who knew he was
alive, Partridge had become something of a living joke, so that he was unlikely
to be taken seriously any longer as a sober dispenser of astrology or medicine.
Publication of his almanac ceased, and while he was far from ruined, the Bickerstaff
incident essentially marked the end of Partridge’s life as a public figure. He
spent the rest of his days trying to discover the true identity of Isaac
Bickerstaff, but to no avail.
The answer that eluded Partridge was not lost to history. It
was eventually uncovered that Isaac Bickerstaff was a pseudonym for none other
than the legendary author and cleric Jonathan Swift. In the years before
writing such classic works of satire as Gulliver’s Travels and “A Modest
Proposal,” Swift amused himself by terrorizing his friends and enemies with
elaborate pranks on All Fools’ Day, his favorite holiday. Not a fan of
charlatan physicians and astrologers to begin with, Swift had taken a special
interest in John Partridge over some sarcastic remarks the old cobbler had made
about Swift’s employer, the Church of England.
Swift published as Bickerstaff one last time in 1709 with a
letter titled “A Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff.” In it, he outlined a series
of elegant arguments to prove that Partridge was indeed dead. Among them, he
reasoned that it was “sure no man alive ever writ such damn’d stuff” as the
tripe printed in Partridge’s almanacs, and that Partridge’s wife had been heard
to swear that “her husband had neither life nor soul in him.” “Therefore,”
Swift continued, “if an uninformed carcass walks still about and is
pleased to call itself Partridge, Mr. Bickerstaff does not think himself any
way answerable for that.” Swift had by now abandoned all pretense of
seriousness, but it no longer mattered.
In the end, half of Swift’s prophesy came true: John
Partridge did eventually die. The precise date fell somewhere around 1715,
putting Swift’s prediction off by a mere 62,000 hours—the blink of an eye on
fate’s great cosmic scale. Partridge’s legacy included an impressive assortment
of publications, titles, and honors, but he would be remembered for nothing
better than the epitaph written for him by Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq. in 1708, part
of which is included as epigraph to this post.
Here, five Foot deep,
lies on his Back,
A Cobler, Starmonger,
and Quack;
Who to the Stars in
pure Good-will,
Does to his best look
upward still.
Weep all you Customers
that use
His Pills, his
Almanacks, or Shoes;
And you that did your
Fortunes seek,
Step to his Grave but
once a Week:
This Earth which bears
his Body’s Print,
You’ll find has so
much Vertue in’t,
That I durst pawn my
Ears ’twill tell
Whate’er concerns you
full as well,
In Physick, Stolen
Goods, or Love,
As he himself could,
when above.
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