Theophilus de Garencières

[3] During the Great Plague, Garencières claimed to have a secret cure, and that nineteen of the twenty patients he had attended had recovered.

[4] He wrote of his "discovery" in A mite cast into the treasury of the famous city of London, being a brief and methodical discourse of the nature, causes, symptomes, remedies and preservation from the plague, in this calamitous year, 1665, digested into aphorismes.

[5] While considering himself a Catholic, Garencières was a harsh critic of Pope Clement VIII, writing the endword to a work of 1670 entitled The famous conclave: wherein Clement VIII was elected Pope, with the intrigues and cunning devices of that ecclesiastical assembly: faithfully translated out of an Italian manuscript found in one of the cardinals studies after his death.

However, Garencières unknowingly used a fake edition of Nostradamus’s work, printed in 1649, which contained quatrains that were forged in order to discredit and foretell the downfall of Cardinal Jules Mazarin, prime minister of France.

[6] Also in 1672, Garencières wrote The Admirable Virtues, And Wonderful Effects Of The True And Genuine Tincture Of Coral, In Physick.