The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened | Page 2

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