Christopher Heydon

Sir Christopher Heydon (14 August 1561 – 1 January 1623) was an English soldier, Member of Parliament, and writer on astrology.

[2] Heydon was educated at Gresham's School, Holt[2][3] and Peterhouse, Cambridge,[4] where he knew the young Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, and after graduating BA in 1579 travelled widely on the continent.

[2] Deeply in debt, Heydon's father Sir William had mortgaged Baconsthorpe and was in need of the Queen's protection from his creditors.

Sir William then threatened to demolish Baconsthorpe Castle, but his son got an Order from the Privy Council, which condemned the plan as unnatural.

[citation needed] The dispute dragged on for years, and when Sir William died in 1594, he left his estate to his widow, but Heydon then went to law against her.

[2] After his father's death, Heydon mortgaged Baconsthorpe, and with his brother John he took part in the Essex revolt of 1601, leading rebel troops through Ludgate, which marked the end of his public life.

The manuscript passed to the astrologer Nicholas Fiske, whose attempts to publish it failed, but it appeared in an edited form in 1650, subsidised by Elias Ashmole, with a preface by William Lilly.

He foresaw that Spain would lose the Indies and predicted that the Austrian Habsburgs would fall in 1623 and Rome in 1646: this would lead to the ruin of the Ottomans and the rise of Christ's kingdom, "the fifth Monarchie of the World", in about 1682.

[2] Heydon married, first, Mirabel, daughter of the London alderman Sir Thomas Rivet, but she died at the age of twenty-two.