As it actually is, the circumstances of Burton’s death remain a mystery, just as self-destruction frequently is, even as etiology has replaced astrology, as psychiatry has supplanted humoral theory. And finally, there’s the observation that within his massive, beguiling, strange, and beautiful The Anatomy of Melancholy, first printed in 1621, Burton rejected suicide-even while writing with understanding about those who are victim of it. Others point to the historian Anthony Wood, who described Burton as “very merry, facete, and lively,” though seemingly happy people do kill themselves. Burton would not have been buried in consecrated ground had he been a suicide-though, of course, it’s possible that friends may have covered for him.

A half-century later, and the antiquary John Aubrey noted in his 1681 Brief Lives that ”tis whispered that… ended his days in that chamber by hanging himself.” There are compelling reasons to think this inaccurate. To accuse anyone of suicide was a slander for Burton’s contemporaries such a death was an unpardonable offense. Because Robert Burton used astrology to forecast the date of his death with exact accuracy-January 25, 1640-even some skeptics in that credulous age suspected that he may have assisted the prediction’s veracity.

Kingdom heirs a new look