But Digby was a good lover. All the absurd rhodomontade of his strange Memoirs notwithstanding, there are gleams of rare beauty in the story of his passion, which raise him to the level of the great lovers. His Memoirs were designed to tell "the beginning, progress, and consummation of that excellent love, which only makes me believe that our pilgrimage in this world is not indifferently laid upon all persons for a curse." And here is a very memorable thing. "Understanding and love are the natural operation of a reasonable creature; and this last, which is a gift that of his own nature must always be bestowed, being the only thing that is really in his power to bestow, it is the worthiest and noblest that can be given."
But, as he naïvely says, "the relations that follow marriage are ... a clog to an active mind"; and his kinsman Bristol was ever urging him to show his worth "by some generous action." The result of this urging was Scanderoon. His object, plainly stated, was to ruin Venetian trade in the Levant, to the advantage of English commerce. The aid and rescue of Algerian slaves were afterthoughts. King James promised him a commission; but Buckingham's secretary, on behalf of his master absent in the Ile de Ré, thought his privileges were being infringed, and the King drew back. Digby acted throughout as if he had a "publike charge," but he was really little other than a pirate. He sailed from Deal in December, 1627, his ships the "Eagle" and the "George and Elizabeth." It was six months before the decisive fight took place; but on the way he had captured some French and Spanish ships near Gibraltar; and what with skirmishes and sickness, his voyage did not want for risk and episode at any time. Digby the landsman maintained discipline, reconciled quarrels, doctored his men, ducked them for disorderliness, and directed the naval and military operations like any old veteran. At Scanderoon [now Alexandretta in the Levant] the French and Venetians, annoyed by his presence, fired on his ships. He answered with such pluck and decision that, after a three hours' fight, the enemy was completely at his mercy, and the Venetians "quitted to him the signiority of the roade." In his Journal of the Voyage you may read a sober account, considering who was the teller of the tale, of a brilliant exploit. He does not disguise the fact that he was acting in defiance of his own countrymen in the Levant. The Vice-Consul at Scanderoon kept telling him that "our nation" at Aleppo "fared much the worse for his abode there." He was setting the merchants in the Levant by the ears, and when he turned his face homewards, the English were the most relieved of all. His exploit "in that drowsy and inactive time ... was looked upon with general estimation," says Clarendon. The King gave him a good welcome, but could not follow it up with any special favour; for there were many complaints over the business, and Scanderoon had to be repudiated.
But Digby could not be merely privateer, and in the Scanderoon expedition we are privileged to look on the Pirate as a Man of Taste. His stay in Florence had given him an interest in the fine arts; and at Milo and Delphos he contrived to make some healthy exercise for his men serve the avidity of the collector. Modern excavators will read with horror of his methods. "I went with most of my shippes to Delphos, a desert island, where staying till the rest were readie, because idlenesse should not fixe their mindes upon any untoward fansies (as is usuall among seamen), and together to avayle myselfe of the convenience of carrying away some antiquities there, I busied them in rolling of stones doune to the see side, which they did with such eagernesse as though it had been the earnestest business that they had come out for, and they mastered prodigious massie weightes; but one stone, the greatest and fairest of all, containing four statues, they gave over after they had been, 300 men, a whole day about it.... But the next day I contrived a way with mastes of shippes and another shippe to ride over against it, that brought it doune with much ease and speede"! What became of this treasure so heroically acquired?
So much for art. Literature was to have its turn with the versatile pirate ere he reached his native shores. During a time of forced inaction at Milo, he began to write his Memoirs. A great commander was expected during a truce, 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.