The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened | Page 3

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