The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened | Page 9

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