Nostradamus & the Queen of England
Nostradamus & the Queen of England
Amongst a litany of age-old prophecies, did the French seer really foresee the downfall of the British Royals five centuries ahead of time?
Macabre though it may be, more than anything else this past Queen’s birthday (and impending Platinum Jubilee), I couldn’t help but be reminded of history’s foremost oracle, Nostradamus, but more so, one of his most topical warnings to date: Did he really predict the precise year of death of Her Majesty?
Born in 1503 as Michel de Nostredame in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, a commune in the Côte d'Azur, and immortalised in one of Vincent van Gogh’s most famous works, The Starry Night, Nostradamus, as he would later latinise himself, began life first as an apothecary specialising in herbal medicine.
Delayed formal baccalauréat studies in grammar, rhetoric, and logic as a teenager following an outbreak of the plague, Nostradamus finally entered the University of Montpellier in 1529 to begin his doctorate in medicine, but found himself thrown out shortly after having been discovered by the student governor as a practicing pharmacist (a then-blacklisted trade), as well as a slanderer of other doctors.
Upon moving and finding love, marriage and children two years later in 1531, tragedy would strike in just three years when his wife and two children would succumb most probably to the looming plague in 1534.
Seemingly taking a sabbatical and becoming somewhat nomadic throughout France and Italy, Nostradamus would return to his Motherland in 1545 to assist prominent physicians as an ‘unofficial’ doctor during a mass outbreak of the plague in Marseille before finally settling in 1547 on the Southern French coast finding a rich widow to marry and raise six children with at the age of forty-four.
Following positive public response to his first written work dealing with astrology in 1550, Nostradamus found encouragement in his new-found abilities, continuing to write one or more annuals called Almanachs — or ‘detailed predictions’ — per year until his death in 1566 which would contain more than 6,000 prophecies at word’s end.
Until that time, where a gout-induced edema would finally get the better of him, an increasingly notorious Nostradamus moved evermore into the realms of the occult culminating in his most recognisable work to date begun in 1555 titled Les Prophéties or ‘The Prophecies’.
Received in equal measure as both a conjurer of evil and talented prophet, it would be the latter of which that would set Nostradamus up for the rest of his life, solidifying his name in the history books, when the then-wife of King Henry II of France, Catherine de' Medici, an Italian noblewoman, would turn admirer into hirer.
As an ardent Catholic and one of the most powerful women of 16th-century Europe following the accidental jousting death of her husband in 1559, Catherine would later mother — and advise — three sons upon the French throne until her own passing in 1589, outliving Nostradamus by 23 years.
Not long after releasing Les Prophéties, however, the famed predictor, through Catherine’s hand, would receive an invitation directly into the Parisian palaces of the French Monarchy, not to abide a death sentence as he originally thought, but to write horoscopes for her infant trio of future kings.
Later, tapping into his former skills as an unqualified doctor, Catherine would offer Nostradamus the position of Counsellor and Physician-in-Ordinary (or on-site clinician) to her second son King Charles IX of France as he acceded the throne in 1560, which not only cemented his gravitas as an esteemed figure within the French aristocracy, but protected him from often noisy criticism and scrutiny outside of it, lasting, it must be said, to this day.
Indeed, one of the main critiques of Nostradamus even now, alongside scholarly accusations of Biblical and historical plagiarism, are that his works rely heavily on the ‘pseudo-sciences’ of “judicial astrology” — the judgement of future events based on the planetary relationships with the Earth — which, in fairness, is something he himself never professed to give him extraordinary foreboding powers.
“Not that I am foolish enough to claim to be a prophet.” — Nostradamus’ open letter to a Privy Councillor, 1566
Furthermore, the integrity of Nostradamus’ still-standing, frequent, and purposely vague quatrains, or ‘predictive’ verses, as found in Les Prophéties and his other literary annals, are that they are endlessly open to interpretation depending on the interpreter; therefore, as is usually the case, they tend to be retrospectively applied and hailed as ‘miracle’ predictions whenever earth-shattering current events take place.
But in the case of the United Kingdom’s sitting Queen Elizabeth II, one such interpretation may well hit its mark; coincidental though this maybe, such is the attraction of Nostradamus’ very own occult following that his name remains a fascinating pillar of historical and cultural renown.
The book in question, The Complete Prophecies of Nostradamus, written in 2009 by now-deceased author, Mario Reading, sets out to right the wrongs of the past by claiming that many of Nostradamus’ numerical sleight-of-hand tricks where his verses were concerned were not just ‘index’ numbers, but ciphers.
In other words, Reading ponders, the index numbers themselves can translate to an ‘analogous’ year in which a predicted event took place over the course of seven centuries Nostradamus used within his scope of future judgement.
Designed to be read as a twofold quatrain in which the dates are given as ‘2022’, the first, given the subject headline (by Reading) as SUCCESSION TO THE UK THRONE, in French and English reads,
Par fureur faincte d’esmotion divine. Through the pretend fury of divine emotion
Sera la femme du grand fort violee: The wife of the great one will be badly wronged
Juges voulans damner telle doctrine, Judges wish to condemn such a doctrine
Victime au peuple ignorant imolee. The victim will be sacrificed to the ignorant people.
Read in conjunction with a second verse titled ABDICATION OF CHARLES III OF ENGLAND, the relevance perhaps becomes a little clearer,
Pour ne vouloir consentir au divorce, Because they disapproved of his divorce
Qui puis apres sera cogneu indigne, A man, who, later, they considered unworthy
Le roy des Isles sera chassé par force. The people will force out the king of the Islands
Mis à son lieu que de roy n’aura signe. A man will replace him who never expected to be king.
In essence, what is being claimed, here, is that following the Queen’s death sometime in 2022, a constitutional crisis will ensue, provoked by the Church of England (‘divine emotion’), on the basis of Charles’s second marriage (a civil marriage) to the former Camilla Parker Bowles (‘the wife of the great one’), thus threatening the disestablishment of the Church itself.
Continuing in this vein, upon his succession to the throne at 74-years-old, such is the resentment toward Charles for previous sins relating to his bitter marriage with Princess Diana (or more modern day sins regarding his widely out of touch ‘green energy’ stance or, indeed, simply his reputation as a charisma-free bore), public pressure will reach such a tipping point that he will be ‘forced’ to relinquish his post to one of his two sons; this ‘king of the Islands’ reference, by the way, important to note, too, as this suggests the successor to the Queen may only now be head of the ‘British Isles’, and not the Commonwealth countries around the world whose governments may have found an opportune moment to become republics.
In the event of abdication, of course, it would be expected to be the eldest heir, and current Duke of Cambridge, William, but Nostradamus throws us a sharp curveball with the last line, ‘A man will replace him who never expected to be king’, suggesting, for one reason or another, the younger heir, Harry, instead.
While extremely unlikely at present, especially when one considers his numerous capital ventures abroad with his celeb-obsessed wife, their declining public perception, and the fact that William has sons and a daughter in succession first, would a state of constitutional turmoil aligned with a deftly prevalent cultural madness really offer us up the unlikeliest of English kings?
Much like a later prediction by Nostradamus relating to the birth of the third antichrist assigned in 2034, for the sake of Britain and the rest of the world, the terror of it all is barely worth thinking about.