It is generally admitted, however, that Charles was very superstitious; and we are told by Lilly, the astrologer, that the King on more than one occasion sent to consult him during his misfortunes. It may be remembered, too, that Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I., consulted a prophetess--Lady Eleanor, daughter of the Earl of Castlehaven, and married to Sir John Davys, the King’s Attorney-General. The idea that she was a prophetess arose from the discovery that the letters of her name, twisted into an anagram, might thus be read: “Reveal, O Daniel.” But her prophetic pride had on one occasion a rebuff; for one of the King’s Privy Council attacked her with her own weapons, maintaining that the real anagram should be read thus: “Dame Eleanor Davys--Never so mad a lady.” But the strange conversation that passed between her Majesty Henrietta Maria and the prophetess is thus given in the latter’s own words: “About two years after the marriage of King Charles I., I was waiting on the Queen as she came from mass or evening service, to know what service she was pleased to require from me. Her first question was ‘Whether she should ever have a son?’ I answered, ‘In a short time.’ The Queen was next desirous to know what would be the destiny of the Duke of Buckingham and the English fleet, which had sailed to attack her brother’s realm, and relieve the siege of Rochelle. “I answered that the Duke of Buckingham would bring home little honour, but his person would return safely, and that speedily. The Queen then returned to her hopes of a son, and I showed that she would have one, and that for a long time she should be happy. “‘But for how long?’ asked the Queen. ‘For sixteen years,’ was my reply. King Charles coming in at that moment, our discourse was interrupted by him. ‘How now, Lady Eleanor,’ said the King, ‘are not you the person who foretold your husband’s death three days before it happened?’ to which his Majesty thought fit to add, ‘that it was the next to breaking his heart.’” Mary II., having heard that a Mrs. Wise, a noted fortune-teller, had prophesied that James II. would be restored, and that the Duke of Norfolk would lose his head, went in person to her to hear what she had to say regarding her own future destiny. But this witch-woman was a perverse Jacobite, and positively refused to read futurity for her Majesty.