The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened Part 1

The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened.

by Kenelm Digby.

INTRODUCTION

With the waning of Sir Kenelm Digby's philosophic reputation his name has not become obscure. It stands, vaguely perhaps, but permanently, for something versatile and brilliant and romantic. He remains a perpetual type of the hero of romance, the double hero, in the field of action and the realm of the spirit. Had he lived in an earlier age he would now be a mythological personage; and even without the looming exaggeration and glamour of myth he still imposes. The men of to-day seem all of little stature, and less consequence, beside the gigantic creature who made his way with equal address and audacity in courts and councils, laboratories and ladies' bowers.

So when, in a seventeenth-century bookseller's advertis.e.m.e.nt, I lighted on a reference to the curious compilation of receipts ent.i.tled _The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Opened_, having the usual idea of him as a great gentleman, romantic Royalist, and somewhat out-of-date philosopher, I was enough astonished at seeing his name attached to what seemed to me, in my ignorance, outside even his wide fields of interest, to hunt for the book without delay, examine its contents, and inquire as to its authenticity. Of course I found it was not unknown. Though the _Dictionary of National Biography_ omits any reference to it, and its name does not occur in Mr.

Carew Hazlitt's _Old Cookery Books_, Dr. Murray quotes it in his great Dictionary, and it is mentioned and discussed in _The Life of Digby by One of his Descendants_. But Mr. Longueville treats it therein with too scant deference. One of a large and interesting series of contemporary books of the kind, its own individual interest is not small; and I commend it with confidence to students of seventeenth-century domestic manners. To apologise for it, to treat it as if it were some freak, some unowned sin of Digby's, would be the greatest mistake. On the contrary, its connection with his life and career is of the closest; and I make bold to a.s.sert that of all his works, with the doubtful exception of his _Memoirs_, it is the one best worth reprinting. It is in no spirit of irony that I say of him who in his own day was looked on almost as Bacon's equal, who was the friend of Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Harvey, Ben Jonson, Cromwell, and all the great spirits of his time, the intimate of kings, and the special friend of queens, that his memory should be revived for his skill in making drinks, and his interest in his own and other folks' kitchens. If to the magnificent and protean Sir Kenelm must now be added still another side, if he must appear not only as gorgeous Cavalier, inmate of courts, controversialist, man of science, occultist, privateer, conspirator, lover and wit, but as _bon viveur_ too, he is not the ordinary _bon viveur_, who feasts at banquets prepared by far away and unconsidered menials. His interest in cookery--say, rather, his pa.s.sion for it--was in truth an integral part of his philosophy, and quite as serious as his laboratory practice at Gresham College and Paris. But to prove what may seem an outrageous exaggeration, we must first run over the varied story of his career; and then _The Closet Opened_ will be seen to fall into its due and important place.

Kenelm Digby owed a good deal to circ.u.mstances, but he owed most of all to his own rich nature. His family was ancient and honourable. Tiltons originally, they took their later name in Henry III's time, on the acquisition of some property in Lincolnshire, though in Warwickshire and Rutland most of them were settled. Three Lancastrian Digby brothers fell at Towton, seven on Bosworth Field. To his grandfather, Sir Everard the philosopher, he was mentally very much akin, much more so than to his father, another of the many Sir Everards, and the most notorious one. Save for his handsome person and the memory of a fervent devotion to the Catholic faith, which was to work strongly in him after he came to mature years, he owed little or nothing to that most unhappy young man, surely the foolishest youth who ever blundered out of the ways of private virtue into conspiracy and crime. Kenelm, his elder son, born July 11, 1603, was barely three years old when his father, the most guileless and the most obstinate of the Gunpowder Plotters, died on the scaffold. The main part of the family wealth, as the family mansion Gothurst--now Gayhurst--in Buckinghamshire, came from Sir Everard's wife, Mary Mulsho; and probably that is one reason why James I acceded to the doomed man's appeal that his widow and children should not be reduced to beggary. Kenelm, in fact, entered on his active career with an income of 3000 a year; but even its value in those days did not furnish a youth of such varied ambitions and such magnificent exterior over handsomely for his journey through the world. His childhood was spent under a cloud. He was bred by a mother whose life was broken and darkened, and whose faith, barely tolerated, would naturally keep her apart from the more favoured persons of the kingdom.

Kenelm might have seemed destined to obscurity; but there was that about the youth that roused interest; and even the timid King James was attracted by him into a magnanimous forgetfulness of his father's offence.

Nevertheless, he could never have had the easy destiny of other young men of his cla.s.s, unless he had been content to be a simple country gentleman; and from the first his circ.u.mstances and his restless mind dictated his career, which had always something in it of the brilliant adventurer.

Another branch of the Digbies rose as the Buckinghamshire family fell. It was a John Digby, afterwards Earl of Bristol, who carried the news of the conspirators' design on the Princess Elizabeth. King James's grat.i.tude was a ladder of promotion, which would have been firmer had not this Protestant Digby incurred the dislike of the royal favourite Buckingham. But in 1617 Sir John was English amba.s.sador in Madrid; and it may have been to get the boy away from the influence of his mother and her Catholic friends that this kinsman, always well disposed towards him, and anxious for his advancement, took him off to Spain when he was fourteen, and kept him there for a year. Nor was his mother's influence unmeddled with otherwise. During some of the years of his minority at least, Laud, then Dean of Gloucester, was his tutor. Tossed to and fro between the rival faiths, he seems to have regarded them both impartially, or indifferently, with an occasional adherence to the one that for the moment had the better exponent.

His education was that of a dilettante. A year in Spain, in Court and diplomatic circles, was followed by a year at Oxford, where Thomas Allen, the mathematician and occultist, looked after his studies. Allen "quickly discerned the natural strength of his faculties, and that spirit of penetration which is so seldom met with in persons of his age." He felt he had under his care a young Pico di Mirandola. It may have been now he made his boyish translation of the _Pastor Fido_, and his unpublished version of Virgil's _Eclogues_. As to the latter, the quite unimportant fact that he made one at all I offer to future compilers of Digby biographies. Allen till his death remained his friend and admirer, and bequeathed to him his valuable library. The MSS. part of it Digby presented to the Bodleian. A portion of the rest he seems to have kept; and though it is said his English library was burnt by the Parliamentarians, it seems not unlikely that some of Allen's books were among his collection at Paris sold after his death by the King of France.

But Kenelm was restlessly longing to taste life outside academic circles, and already he was hotly in love with his old playmate, now grown into great beauty, Venetia Anastasia Stanley, daughter of Edward Stanley of Tonge, in Shropshire, and granddaughter of the Earl of Northumberland. If I could connect the beautiful Venetia with this cookery book, I should willingly linger over the tale of her striking and brief career. But though the elder Lady Digby contributed something to _The Closet Opened_, there is no suggestion that it owes a single receipt to the younger. Above Kenelm in station as she was, he could hardly have aspired to her save for her curiously forlorn situation. Mother-less, and her father a recluse, she was left to bring herself up, and to bestow her affections where she might. To Kenelm's ardour she responded readily; and he philandered about her for a year or two. But his mother would hear nothing of the match; and at seventeen he was sent out on the grand tour, the object of which, we learn from his _Memoirs_, was "to banish admiration, which for the most part accompanieth home-bred minds, and is daughter of ignorance." Kenelm proved better than the ideal set before him; and the more he travelled the more he admired.

Into this tale of love and adventure I must break with the disturbing intelligence that the handsome and romantic and spirited youth was in all probability already procuring material for the compilation on _Physick and Chirurgery_, which Hartman, his steward, published after his death. It was not as a middle-aged _bon viveur_, nor as an elderly hypochondriac, that he began his medical studies, but in the heyday of youth, and quite seriously, too. The explanation brings with it light on some other of his interests as well. When he set out on the grand tour, his head full of love and the prospects of adventure, he found the spare energy to write from London to a good friend of his, the Rev. Mr. Sandy, Parson of Great Lindford. In this letter--the original is in the Ashmolean--Kenelm asks for the good parson's prayers, and sends him "a ma.n.u.script of elections of divers good authors."

Mr. Longueville, who gives the letter, has strangely failed to identify Sandy with the famous Richard Napier, parson, physician, and astrologer, of the well-known family of Napier of Merchistoun. His father, Alexander Napier, was often known as "Sandy"; and the son held the alternative names also. Great Lindford is two and a half miles from Gothurst; and it is possible that Protestant friends, perhaps Laud himself, urged on the good parson the duty of looking after the young Catholic gentleman. Sandy (Napier) was also probably his mother's medical adviser: he certainly acted as such to some members of her family. A man of fervent piety--his "knees were h.o.r.n.y with frequent praying," says Aubrey--he was, besides, a zealous student of alchemy and astrology, a friend of Dee, of Lilly, and of Booker. Very likely Kenelm had been entrusted to Allen's care at Oxford on the recommendation of Sandy; for Allen, one of his intimates, was a serious occultist, who, according to his servant's account, "used to meet the spirits on the stairs like swarms of bees." With these occupations Napier combined a large medical practice in the Midlands, the proceeds of which he gave to the poor, living ascetically himself. His favourite nephew, Richard Napier the younger, his pupil in all these arts and sciences, was about the same age as Kenelm, and spent his holidays at Great Lindford. The correspondence went on. Digby continued his medical observations abroad; and after his return we find him writing to Sandy, communicating "some receipts," and asking for pills that had been ordered. Thus we have arrived at the early influences which drew the young Catholic squire towards the art of healing and the occult sciences. The latter he dabbled in all his life. In the former his interest was serious and steadfast.

He remained out of England three years. From Paris the plague drove him to Angers, where the appearance of the handsome English youth caused such commotion in the heart of the Queen Mother, Marie de Medicis, that she evidently lost her head. His narrative of her behaviour had to be expurgated when his _Memoirs_ were published in 1827. He fled these royal attentions; spread a report of his death, and made his way to Italy. His two years in Florence were not all spent about the Grand-ducal Court. His mind, keen and of infinite curiosity, was hungering after the universal knowledge he aspired to; and Galileo, then writing his Dialogues in his retirement at Bellosguardo, could not have been left unvisited by the eager young student. In after years, Digby used to say that it was in Florence he met the Carmelite friar who brought from the East the secret of the Powder of Sympathy, which cured wounds without contact. The friar who had refused to divulge the secret to the Grand Duke confided it to him--of which more hereafter.

From Florence he pa.s.sed to Spain; and his arrival was happily timed--probably by his ever anxious kinsman; for a few days later Prince Charles and Buckingham landed, on the Spanish Marriage business; and so agreeable was young Digby that, in spite of Buckingham's dislike of his name, he became part of the Prince's household, and returned with the party in October, 1623. Court favours seemed now to open out a career for him.

King James knighted him, in what might have proved a fatal ceremony; for so tremblingly nervous of the naked steel was the royal hand, that Buckingham had to turn the sword aside from doing damage instead of honour. He was also made Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Prince Charles. But no other signal favours followed these. For all his agreeableness he was not of the stuff courtiers are made of--though James had a kindness for him, and was entertained by his eagerness and ingenuity. Bacon, too, just before his death, had come across this zealous young student of the experimental methods, and had meant, Digby said, to include an account of the Powder of Sympathy in an appendix to his _Natural History_.

In Spain, Kenelm had flirted with some Spanish ladies, notably with the beautiful Donna Anna Maria Manrique, urged thereto by gibes at his coldness; but Venetia was still the lady of his heart. Her amorous adventures, in the meanwhile, had been more serious and much more notorious. His letters had miscarried, and had been kept back by his mother. Venetia pleaded her belief in his death. Aubrey's account of her is a ma.s.s of picturesque scandal. "She was a most beautiful desirable creature.... The young eagles had espied her, and she was sanguine and tractable, and of much suavity (which to abuse was great pittie)." Making all allowance for gossip, the truth seems to be that in Kenelm's absence she had been at least the mistress of Sir Edward Sackville, afterwards the fourth Earl of Dorset; that Dorset tired of her; and on Digby's return she was more than willing to return to her old love. But, alas! Sackville had her picture, which seemed to her compromising. Digby, therefore, having accepted her apologies and extenuations, challenged Sackville to a duel; whereupon the faithless one proved at least magnanimous; refused to fight, gave up the picture, and swore that Venetia was blameless as she was fair.

A private marriage followed; and it was only on the birth of his second son John that Sir Kenelm acknowledged it to the world. To read nearly all his _Memoirs_ is to receive the impression that he looked on his wife as a wronged innocent. To read the whole is to feel he knew the truth and took the risk, which was not very great after all; for the lady of the many suitors and several adventures settled down to the mildest domesticity.

They say he was jealous; but no one has said she gave him cause. The tale runs that Dorset visited them once a year, and "only kissed her hand, Sir Kenelm being by."

But Digby was a good lover. All the absurd rhodomontade of his strange _Memoirs_ notwithstanding, there are gleams of rare beauty in the story of his pa.s.sion, which raise him to the level of the great lovers. His _Memoirs_ were designed to tell "the beginning, progress, and consummation of that excellent love, which only makes me believe that our pilgrimage in this world is not indifferently laid upon all persons for a curse." And here is a very memorable thing. "Understanding and love are the natural operation of a reasonable creature; and this last, which is a gift that of his own nature must always be bestowed, _being the only thing that is really in his power to bestow_, it is the worthiest and n.o.blest that can be given."

But, as he navely says, "the relations that follow marriage are ... a clog to an active mind"; and his kinsman Bristol was ever urging him to show his worth "by some generous action." The result of this urging was Scanderoon.

His object, plainly stated, was to ruin Venetian trade in the Levant, to the advantage of English commerce. The aid and rescue of Algerian slaves were afterthoughts. King James promised him a commission; but Buckingham's secretary, on behalf of his master absent in the Ile de Re, thought his privileges were being infringed, and the King drew back. Digby acted throughout as if he had a "publike charge," but he was really little other than a pirate. He sailed from Deal in December, 1627, his ships the "Eagle"

and the "George and Elizabeth." It was six months before the decisive fight took place; but on the way he had captured some French and Spanish ships near Gibraltar; and what with skirmishes and sickness, his voyage did not want for risk and episode at any time. Digby the landsman maintained discipline, reconciled quarrels, doctored his men, ducked them for disorderliness, and directed the naval and military operations like any old veteran. At Scanderoon [now Alexandretta in the Levant] the French and Venetians, annoyed by his presence, fired on his ships. He answered with such pluck and decision that, after a three hours' fight, the enemy was completely at his mercy, and the Venetians "quitted to him the signiority of the roade." In his Journal of the Voyage you may read a sober account, considering who was the teller of the tale, of a brilliant exploit. He does not disguise the fact that he was acting in defiance of his own countrymen in the Levant. The Vice-Consul at Scanderoon kept telling him that "our nation" at Aleppo "fared much the worse for his abode there." He was setting the merchants in the Levant by the ears, and when he turned his face homewards, the English were the most relieved of all. His exploit "in that drowsy and inactive time ... was looked upon with general estimation,"

says Clarendon. The King gave him a good welcome, but could not follow it up with any special favour; for there were many complaints over the business, and Scanderoon had to be repudiated.

But Digby could not be merely privateer, and in the Scanderoon expedition we are privileged to look on the Pirate as a Man of Taste. His stay in Florence had given him an interest in the fine arts; and at Milo and Delphos he contrived to make some healthy exercise for his men serve the avidity of the collector. Modern excavators will read with horror of his methods. "I went with most of my shippes to Delphos, a desert island, where staying till the rest were readie, because idlenesse should not fixe their mindes upon any untoward fansies (as is usuall among seamen), and together to avayle myselfe of the convenience of carrying away some antiquities there, I busied them in rolling of stones doune to the see side, which they did with such eagernesse as though it had been the earnestest business that they had come out for, and they mastered prodigious ma.s.sie weightes; but one stone, the greatest and fairest of all, containing four statues, they gave over after they had been, 300 men, a whole day about it.... But the next day I contrived a way with mastes of shippes and another shippe to ride over against it, that brought it doune with much ease and speede"!

What became of this treasure so heroically acquired?

So much for art. Literature was to have its turn with the versatile pirate ere he reached his native sh.o.r.es. During a time of forced inaction at Milo, he began to write his _Memoirs_. A great commander was expected during a truce, it appears, to pay lavish attentions to the native ladies. Neglect of this gallantry was construed almost as a national insult. Sir Kenelm, faithful to his Venetia, excused himself on the plea of much business. But he had little or no business; and he used his retirement to pen the amazing account of his early life and his love story, where he appears as Theagenes and his wife as Stelliana, as strange a mixture of rhodomontade and real romance as exists among the autobiographies of the world. Of course it does not represent Digby at his maturity. Among his MSS. the _Memoirs_ were found with the t.i.tle of _Loose Fantasies_, and they were not printed till 1827.

It was quite a minor post in the Navy he received in recognition of Scanderoon, and one wonders why he took it. Perhaps to gain experience, of which he was always greedy. Or Scanderoon may have emptied his treasuries.

After the Restoration he had a hard struggle to get repaid for his ransom of slaves on the Algerian coast. At any rate, as Naval Commissioner he earned the reputation of a hard-working public servant.

If his constantly-changing life can be said to have had a turning-point, it occurred in 1633, when his wife died suddenly. The death of the lovely Venetia was the signal for a great outburst of vile poetry on her beauty and merits. Ben Jonson, her loyal friend and Kenelm's, wrote several elegies, one of them the worst. Vandyck painted her several times; and so the memory of her loveliness is secure. As to her virtues, amiability seems to have been of their number. "Unmatcht for beauty, chaster than the ayre," wrote one poet. When they opened her head it was discovered she had little brain; and gossip attributed the fact to her having drunk viper-wine--by her husband's advice--for her complexion. This sounds absurd only to those who have not perused the _Receipts in Physick and Chirurgery_. Little brain or not, her husband praised her wits. Ben Jonson wrote with devotion of her "who was my muse, and life of all I did."

Digby imitated his father-in-law who, in similar circ.u.mstances, gave himself up to solitude and recollection. His place of retirement was Gresham College. Do its present students remember it once housed a hermit who "wore a long mourning cloake, a high crowned hat, his beard unshorne ... as signes of sorrowe for his beloved wife"? There "he diverted himself with chymistry and the professor's good conversation." He had "a fair and large laboratory ... erected under the lodgings of the Divinity Reader."

Hans Hunneades the Hungarian was his operator.

But another influence was at work. For the first time his mind turned seriously to religion. Romanist friends were persuading him to his father's faith. His old tutor Laud and other Protestants were doing their best to settle him on their side. Out of the struggle of choice he came, in 1636, a fervent and convinced Catholic. He was to prove his devotion over and over again; but I fear that Catholics of to-day would view with suspicion his views on ecclesiastical authority. In his dedication of his _Treatise on the Soul_ to his son Kenelm, there is a spirited defence of the right, of the intelligent to private judgment in matters of doctrine. Nevertheless, his Catholicism, though rationalist, was sincere, and he spent much energy in propaganda among his friends--witness his rather dull little brochure, the _Conference with a Lady about Choice of Religion_ (1638), and his correspondence with his kinsman, Lord Digby, who did, indeed, later, come over to the older faith. Ere long he earned the reputation of being "not only an open but a busy Papist," though "an eager enemy to the Jesuits."

From this time dates his close friendship with the Queen, Henrietta Maria, and her Catholic friends, Sir Tobie Matthew, Endymion Porter, and Walter Montague. He and Montague were specially chosen by the Queen to appeal to the English Catholics for aid towards Charles's campaign in Scotland. Digby was certainly a hot inciter of the King to foolish activity; but in the light of his after history, it would seem always with a view to the complete freedom of the Catholic religion. A prominent King's man, nay, a Queen's man, which was held to be something extremer, he played, however, an individual part in the struggle. He was well fitted for the Cavalier role by the magnificence of his person, by his splendid hospitality, his contempt for sects, his aristocratic instincts, and his manner of the Great World. But if he liked good cheer and a great way of living, he is never to be imagined as clinking cans with a "Hey for Cavaliers! Ho for Cavaliers!"

He never fought for the King's cause--though he fought a duel in Paris with a French lord who took Charles's name in vain, and killed his man too. His role was always the intellectual one. He conspired for the cause--chiefly, I think, out of personal friendship, and because he held it to be the cause of his Church. He was not a virulent politician; and on the question of divine right the orthodox Cavaliers must have felt him to be very unsound indeed.

The era of Parliaments had now come, and Digby was to feel it. He was summoned to the bar of the House as a Popish recusant. Charles was ordered to banish him and Montague from his councils and his presence; and their examination continued at intervals till the middle of 1642. The Queen interceded for Digby with much warmth, but she was a dangerous friend; and in the same year Montague and he were sent to prison. I have heard a tradition that Crosby Hall was for a time his comfortable jail, but can find no corroboration of this. The serjeant-at-arms confined him for a brief s.p.a.ce at The Three Tuns, near Charing Cross, "where his conversation made the prison a place of delight" to his fellows. Later, at Winchester House, Southwark, where he remained in honourable confinement for two years, he was busy with writing and experimenting--to preserve him from "a languishing and rusting leisure." Two pamphlets, both of them hasty improvisations, one a philosophic commentary on a certain stanza of the _Faerie Queen_, the other, his well-known _Observations on the 'Religio Medici'_, are but mere bubbles of this seething activity, given over mostly to the preparation of his _Two Treatises_, "Of the Body," and "Of the Soul," published later in Paris, and to experiments on gla.s.s-making.

Many efforts were made for his release, the most efficacious by the Queen of France. It should have been the Dowager Marie de Medicis, in memory of her hot flame for him when he was a youth; but though she may have initiated the appeal, she died before his release, which he seems to have owed to Anne of Austria's good services. Freedom meant banishment, but this sentence he did not take very seriously. In these years he was continually going and coming between France and England, now warned by Parliament, now tolerated, now banished, again daring return, and escaping from the net. "I can compare him to nothing but to a great fish that we catch and let go again; but still he will come to the bait," said Selden of him in his _Table-Talk_.

Exile in Paris provided fresh opportunity for scientific study, though his connection with the English Catholic malcontents, and his services to the Queen Henrietta Maria, who now made him her Chancellor, absorbed much of his time. When the Cause needed him, the Cavalier broke away from philosophy; and in 1645 he set out for Rome, at the bidding of the Queen, to beg money for her schemes. With all his address, diplomacy was not among the chief of his talents. With high personages he took a high tone.

Innocent X gave 10,000 crowns to the Cause; but they quarrelled; and the Pope went so far as to accuse Digby of misappropriation of the money.

Digby, a man of clean hands, seems to have taken up the Queen's quarrel.

She would have nothing to do with Rinuccini's Irish expedition, which his Holiness was supporting; and her Chancellor naturally insisted on disbursing the funds at her commands rather than at the Pope's. Moreover, he was now renewing his friendship with Thomas White, a heretic Catholic priest, of several _aliases_, some of whose work had been placed on the Index. White was a philosophic thinker of considerable power and subtlety, and he and Digby acted and reacted on each other strongly--though Digby's debt is perhaps the greater. Their respective parts in the _Two Treatises_ and in the _Inst.i.tutionum Peripateticorum libri quinque_, published under White's name, but for which Sir Kenelm is given the main credit, can hardly now be sifted. White, at all events, was not a prudent friend for an envoy to the Holy See. Digby "grew high and hectored with his holinesse, and gave him the lye. The pope said he was mad." Thus Aubrey. Henrietta Maria sent him once more on the same errand; but the Roman Curia continued to look on him as a "useless and restless man, with scanty wisdom." Before returning, however, he paid a round of visits to Italian courts, making everywhere a profound impression by his handsome person and his liveliness. He had to hasten back to England on his own business. His fortunes were desperate; and he desired to compound for his estates.

A week or so after the King's death he is proved by his correspondence to be in France, having fled after one more p.r.o.nouncement of him as a dangerous man. He went into exile this time with a sad heart; and it was not only the loyalist in him that cried out. The life of an English country gentleman would never have satisfied him; yet he longed for it now it had become impossible. He writes from Calais to a friend: "Those innocent recreations you mention of tabors and pipes, and dancing ladies, and convenient country houses, shady walks and close arbours, make one sigh to be again a spectator of them, and to be again in little England, where time slides more gently away than in any part of the world. _Quando sia mai ch'a rividerti io torno_?"

He went this time knowing better than his fellow royalists the meaning of events. He was still a rank, but at least an intelligent, conspirator.

English correspondents at Rouen and Caen report him in the company of one Watson, an Independent; and that he is proposing "to join the interests of all the English papists with the b.l.o.o.d.y party that murdered the king." Dr.

Winsted, an English doctor in Rouen, asked him with indignation how he could meditate going back to England, "considering the abomination of that country." Digby replied that he was forced to it. "If he went not now he must starve." He plainly saw who was the real and only force in England; and he was going to make a bargain with the strong man for himself and his co-religionists. As a matter of fact there is no trace of his return at this moment. Not merely was his property in danger, but his head as well.

Yet he never repented of his policy, and he carried it out, so far as might be, in his dealings with Cromwell a few years later. And Henrietta Maria bore him no grudge on this score.

Exile in Paris meant friendly intercourse with, and consolation of the Queen, but also scientific research. In 1651 Evelyn was visiting him there, and being stirred by his enthusiasm into attending Febur's chemistry lectures along with him. Before that must have taken place his pilgrimage to Descartes, who died in 1650. Apparently Sir Kenelm had gone to Egmont as an unknown stranger; and it throws light on his wide reputation as a man of ideas and a conversationalist, that into his torrent of questions and speculation Descartes broke with, "You can be none other than Digby." The English scientist's practical mind--for he had always a practical end in view, however fantastic his methods--showed itself in his counsel to the author of the _Discours sur la Methode_. Why all this labour for mere abstract speculation? Why not apply his genius to the one great subject, the prolongation of human life? Descartes, it appears, did not need the advice. He said the subject was engaging his mind; and though he "dared not look forward to man being rendered immortal, he was quite certain his length of life could be made equal to the patriarch's." In fact, he was composing at the time an _Abrege de Medecine_, and popular report said he believed men could live four or five hundred years. He died prematurely of too much faith in his own medical theories.

In 1653 permission was given to Digby to return, on condition he would not meddle with Royalist plots. He had been in communication with Cromwell, and had done some diplomatic business for him in Paris. On his return in 1654, and for the next few years, he was in the closest relations with the Protector, thereby carrying out the principle he had probably adopted from White, of a "universal pa.s.sive obedience to any species of government that had obtained an establishment." His Royalist friends made an outcry, and so did the Puritans; but Digby was confident of obtaining from Cromwell great advantages for the English Catholics, and the Protector, it seems, fully trusted the intentions and the abilities of this strange and fascinating personality who came to him out of the enemy's camp. Delicate business was given into his hands, that of preventing an alliance between France and Spain. Prynne, in his _True and Perfect Narrative_, bitterly denounced Cromwell in "that Sir Kenelme Digby was his particular favourite, and lodged at Whitehall; that Maurice Conry, Provincial of the Franciscans in England, and other priests, had his protections under hand and seal." Of Digby's feelings towards Cromwell there is clear evidence. It seems his loyalty had been questioned in his absence; and he writes from Paris, in March, 1656, to Secretary Thurloe: "Whatsoever may be disliked by my Lord Protector and the Council of State must be detested by me. My obligations to his Highness are so great, etc." And again, "How pa.s.sionate I am for his service and for his honour and interest, even to exposing my life for him." The intimacy, begun on both sides in mere policy, had evidently grown to friendship and mutual admiration.

The illness of which he died had already attacked him, and it was for his health he went to Montpelier in 1658. His stay in that seat of learning was made memorable by his reading to a company of eminent persons his _Discourse on the Powder of Sympathy_, which has brought him more fame and more ridicule than anything else. I have already referred to the secret confided to him as a youth in Florence by the Carmelite Friar from the East. When he came back to England he spoke of the great discovery, and had occasion to use it. Howell--of the _Familiar Letters_--was, according to Sir Kenelm's account, wounded while trying to part two friends who were fighting a duel. His wounds were hastily tied up with his garter, and Digby was sent for. Digby asked for the garter-bandage, and steeped it in a basin in which he had dissolved his secret powder (of vitriol). Immediately Howell felt a "pleasing kind of freshnesse, as it were a wet cold napkin did spread over my hand." "Take off all the plasters and wrappings," said Digby. "Keep the wound clean, and neither too hot nor too cold." Afterwards he took the bandage from the water, and hung it before a great fire to dry; whereupon Howell's servant came running to say his master was much worse, and in a burning fever. The bandage plunged once more in the dissolved powder, soothed the patient at a distance; and in a few days the wound was healed. Digby declared that James and Buckingham were interested witnesses of the cure; and the king "drolled with him about it (which he could do with a very good grace)." He said he divulged the secret to the Duke of Mayenne. After the Duke's death his surgeon sold it so that "now there is scarce any country barber but knows it." Why did not Digby try it on his wounded men at Scanderoon? His _Discourse_ to the learned a.s.sembly is a curious medley of subtle observation and old wives' tales, set out in sober, orderly, one might almost say scientific, fashion. Roughly, the substance of it may be summed up as "Like to like." The secret powder is a medium whereby the atoms in the bandage are drawn back to their proper place in the body! After Digby's death you could buy the powder at Hartman's shop for sixpence.

At the Restoration he returned to England. He was still Henrietta Maria's Chancellor. His relations with Cromwell had never broken their friendship; and probably he still made possets for her at Somerset House as he had done in the old days. But by Charles II there was no special favour shown him, beyond repayment for his ransom of English slaves during the Scanderoon voyage; and in 1664 he was forbidden the Court. The reason is not definitely known. Charles may have only gradually, but at last grimly, resented, the more he learnt of it, Digby's recognition of the usurper.

He found happiness in science, in books, in conversation, in medicine, stilling and cookery. In 1661 he had lectured at Gresham College on _The Vegetation of Plants_. When the Royal Society was inaugurated, in 1663, he was one of the Council. His house became a kind of academy, where wits, experimentalists, occultists, philosophers, and men of letters worked and talked. This was the house in Covent Garden. An earlier one is also noted by Aubrey. "The faire howses in Holbourne between King's Street and Southampton Street (which brake-off the continuance of them) were, about 1633, built by Sir Kenelme; where he lived before the civill warres. Since the restauration of Charles II he lived in the last faire house westward in the north portico of Covent Garden, where my lord Denzill Hollis lived since. He had a laboratory there." This latter house, which can be seen in its eighteenth-century guise in Hogarth's print of "Morning," in _The Four Hours of the Day_ set, is now the quarters of the National Sporting Club.

There he worked and talked and entertained, made his metheglin and _aqua vitae_ and other messes, till his last illness in 1665. Paris as ever attracted him; and in France were good doctors for his disease, the stone.

He had himself borne on a litter to the coast; but feeling death's hand on him, he turned his face homeward again, and died in Covent Garden, June 11, 1665. In his will he desired to be buried by his beautiful Venetia in Christ Church, Newgate, and that no mention should be made of him on the tomb, where he had engraved four Latin inscriptions to her memory. But Ferrar wrote an epitaph for him:--

"Under this tomb the matchless Digby lies, Digby the great, the valiant, and the wise," etc.

The Great Fire destroyed the tomb, and scattered their ashes.

He had died poor; and his surviving son John, with whom he had been on bad terms, declared that all the property that came to him was his father's sumptuously compiled history of the Digby family. Apparently John regained some part of the estates later, which perhaps had only been left away from him to pay off debts. A great library of Sir Kenelm's was still in Paris; and after his death it was claimed by the French king, and sold for 10,000 crowns. His kinsman, the second Earl of Bristol, bought it, and joined it to his own; and the catalogue of the combined collection, sold in London in 1683, is an interesting and too little tapped source for Digby's mental history. Of his five children, three were already dead. Kenelm, his eldest son, had fallen at St. Neot's, in 1648, fighting for the King. It was his remaining son John who sanctioned the publication of his father's receipts.

Sir Kenelm Digby has been recognised as the type of the great amateur, but always with a shaking of the head. Why this scorn of accomplished amateurs?

Rather may their tribe increase, let us pray. Our world languisheth now for lack of them. He was fitted by nature to play the role superbly, to force his circ.u.mstances, never over pliant, to serve not his material interests, but his fame, his craving for universal knowledge and attainments. Says Wood: "His person was handsome and gigantick, and nothing was wanting to make him a compleat Cavalier. He had so graceful elocution and n.o.ble address that had he been dropped out of the clouds into any part of the world, he would have made himself respected; but the Jesuits who cared not for him, spoke spitefully, and said it was true, but then he must not stay there above six weeks. He had a great faculty, which proceeded from abundance of wit and invention, of proposing and reporting matters to the Virtuosi."

Women adored him; and he took great pains to please them--though in spite of the importunities of Marie de Medicis, the long friendship with Henrietta Maria, his early flirtation with the lovely Spaniard, his earnest and impolitic championship of the notorious Lady Purbeck--Romish convert and adventuress--Venetia, it seems, remained his only love. He was never the mere gallant. He treated women as his intellectual equals, but as equals who had to be splendidly entertained and amused. His conversation was "ingeniose and innocent." Lloyd speaks of "the grace wherewith he could relate _magnarum rerum minutias_, the little circ.u.mstances of great matters." But men were at his feet as well; and on his tour among Italian courts, one of the grandees said that, "having no children, he was very willing his wife should bring him a Prince by Sir Kenelme, whom he imagined the just measure of perfection."