The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened | Page 6

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