Fingers, frog's and fairies

Fortune telling was all the rage in the 16th and 17th centuries, and practitioners would stop at nothing to tap in to the supernatural. Martha McGill tells a story of Highland seers, tarot cards and encounters with the spirit world

- Martha McGill

As the younger son of a baron, Goodwin Wharton was determined to live well. Inconveniently, he had no money, but he was not short of ideas. He invented various devices, including one “for the squenching of public fires”. He went diving for sunken treasure. He got elected to parliament in 1679, only to damage his political fortunes with an incendiary speech claiming that the soon-to-be King James II & VII wanted to “destroy us all”. He even tried eating the still-palpitating heart of a mole, a traditional charm for foretelling the future. He hoped it would help him win at gambling. But nothing worked out.

By 1683 Wharton was desperate, and he found himself entering a “scurvy” tavern in a “poor beggarly alley” in London’s Covent Garden. Among the inglorious clientele was Mary Parish, an impoverished ‘cunning’- woman in her fifties. Wharton wanted a more effective gambling charm. Instead, he got a partner. Over the next 20 years Parish advised Wharton on his affairs, procured magical items for him and sent him on treasure hunts. She also conceived - by her own reckoning - 106 of Wharton’s children, although only one or two made it to adulthood.

Perhaps most striking were the pair’s dealings with the spirit world. Parish promised to introduce Wharton to the fairy queen, but problems kept arising: the way was flooded, the queen was on her period, a fairy duke had tried to poison her with chocolate. Nor did Wharton ever see Parish’s angelic advisors, though they apparently shaved his hair while he slept to give him a noble forehead.

But by 1687, Wharton had learned to communicate with higher powers. The voice of the Lord guided him while he gambled, and assured him he would seduce at least 500 women, including Mary, wife of James II. This never came to pass, but Wharton’s fortunes did recover in time: he re-entered politics and became one of the lords commissioners of the Admiralty in 1697–99.

The world of spirits