The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened by Sir Kenelm Digby (popular books of all time TXT) 📕

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