Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Jason Isbell and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
Transcribers note: Original spellings, including inconsistencies, left in
this e-text.
[Illustration: Sir Kenelm Digby Knight. After the Painting by Sir Anthony
Vandyke in His Majesty's Collection at Windsor Castle]
THE CLOSET OF SIR KENELM DIGBY KNIGHT OPENED:
NEWLY EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTION, NOTES, AND GLOSSARY, BY ANNE MACDONELL
LONDON: PHILIP LEE WARNER
38 ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 1910
The design on the front binding of this volume reproduces a contemporary
Binding (possibly by le Gascon?) from the library of the Author, whose arms
it embodies.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION ix
THE CLOSET OF SIR KENELM DIGBY OPENED:
TITLE PAGE OF THE FIRST EDITION 1
TO THE READER 3
RECEIPTS FOR MEAD, METHEGLIN, AND OTHER DRINKS 5
COOKERY RECEIPTS 111
THE TABLE 263
APPENDIX I. SOME ADDITIONAL RECEIPTS 271
II. THE POWDER OF SYMPATHY 272
III. LIST OF THE HERBS, FLOWERS, &C.,
REFERRED TO IN THE TEXT 274
NOTES 277
GLOSSARY 283
INDEX OF RECEIPTS 287
_The frontispiece is a reproduction in photogravure after the portrait of
Sir Kenelm Digby by Sir Anthony Vandyke in His Majesty's Collection at
Windsor Castle, by permission._
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 advertisement, I lighted on
a reference to the curious compilation of receipts entitled _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gentleman, romantic Royalist, and somewhat out-of-date philosopher, I was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 assert 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 passion 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 circumstances, 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 class, unless he had been content to be a simple country gentleman;
and from the first his circumstances 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 gratitude 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 ambassador 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 manuscript 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 horny 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 Médicis, 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 passed 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 mass 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 passion, 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 noblest that can be
given."
But, as he naïvely 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 Ré, 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 massie 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 shores. 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 title 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 circumstances, 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
rôle 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
rôle 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 space 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
_Faërie 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 glass-making.
Many efforts were made for his release, the most efficacious by the Queen
of France. It should have been the Dowager Marie de Médicis, 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 _Institutionum 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 pronouncement 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 bloody 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 Fébur'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 Méthode_. 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 _Abrégé de Médecine_, 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 passive 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 passionate 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 assembly 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
vitæ_ 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 rôle superbly, to force
his circumstances, 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 noble
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 Médicis, 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 circumstances 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."
A first-rate swordsman, yet was he "not apt in the least to give offence."
His strength was that of a giant. Bristol related that one day at Sherborne
he took up "a midling man," chair and all, with one arm. But there was
nothing of the swashbuckler about him, and his endless vitality was matched
by his courtesy. True, he hustled a Pope; but he addressed the Short
Parliament in such reverential terms as no Roundhead could have found. One
who had been courtier, exile, naval commander, student, prisoner, and
diplomatist, who had associated with all sorts of persons, from kings to
alchemists and cooks, had learnt resourcefulness. But he was never too hard
put to it perhaps, seeing that "if he had not fourpence, wherever he came
he would find respect and credit." "No man knew better how to abound, and
to be abased, and either was indifferent to him."
He had his detractors. One who plays so many parts incites envy and
ridicule; and he laid himself particularly open to both. Fantasy was in the
Digby blood; and that agility of mind and nerve that turns now here, now
there, to satisfy an unquenchable curiosity, that exuberance of mental
spirits that forces to rapid and continuous expression, has ever been
suspect of the English mind. He was "highly caressed in France." To Evelyn
Sir Kenelm was a "teller of strange things," and again the Diarist called
him "an errant mountebank"--though Evelyn sought his society, and was
grateful for its stimulus. Lady Fanshawe, who met him at Calais, at the
Governor's table, says he "enlarged somewhat more in extraordinary stories
than might be averred.... That was his infirmity, though otherwise a person
of most excellent parts, and a very fine bred gentleman." "A certain
eccentricity and unsteadiness perhaps inseparable from a mind of such
vanity," is Lodge's criticism. "The Pliny of our age for lying," quoth
Stubbes. But Digby's extraordinary stories were by no means all false. He
may have talked sometimes to _épater le bourgeois;_ but his serious
statements were often judged as were the wonders of evolution by country
audiences in the seventies.
His offence was he must always be talking. His ideas he must share,
expound, illustrate, whether or no they were ripe. It is the sign-manual of
the sincere amateur. His books are probably but the lees of his
conversation. He was not, in the first place, a literary person. His
_Memoirs_ are good reading for those with a touch of the fantastic in
themselves; but the average literary critic will dub them rhodomontade. His
scientific and controversial treatises, not at all unreadable, and full of
strange old lore, survive as curiosities never to be reprinted.
Nevertheless, his temper was distinctly scientific, and if his exact
discoveries be limited to observing the effect of oxygen on plant-life, and
his actual invention to a particular kind of glass bottle, yet he was an
eager student and populariser of the work of Bacon, Galileo, and Harvey;
and his laboratories were the nursing grounds of the new experimental
philosophy.
With a distinctly rationalistic temper, he was yet a faithful, if
independent, son of the Roman Church. He speaks sometimes as if he regarded
the Church as the great storehouse of necessary authority for the
intellectually feeble; but he accepted the main dogmas himself, being
satisfied of them by intuition and reason. Protestantism, he held, was not
for the ordinary person, considering "the natural imbecility of man's wits
and understandings." His piety was a thing apart, a matter of heredity
perhaps, and of his poetic temperament. I have heard him called by that
abused name, "mystic." He was nothing of the sort, and he said so in
memorable words. As an act of devotion he translated the _Adhering to God_
of Albertus Magnus. In the dedication to his mother he compares himself, as
the translator of this mystic treatise, to certain travellers who "speak
upon hearsay of countries they were never in." "The various course in the
world that I have runne myself out of breath in, hath afforded me little
means for solid recollection." Yet was he now and then upon the threshold.
With streaks of the quack and adventurer in him, he gave out deep notes.
Says Lloyd: "His soul [was] one of those few souls that understand
themselves."