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 us pray. Our world languisheth now for lack of them. He was fitted by nature to play the rôle superbly, to force his circumstances, never over pliant, to serve not his material interests, but his fame, his craving for universal knowledge and attainments. Says Wood: "His person was handsome and gigantick, and nothing was wanting to make him a compleat Cavalier. He had so graceful elocution and noble address that had he been dropped out of the clouds into any part of the world, he would have made himself respected; but the Jesuits who cared not for him, spoke spitefully, and said it was true, but then he must not stay there above six weeks. He had a great faculty, which proceeded from abundance of wit and invention, of proposing and reporting matters to the Virtuosi."
Women adored him; and he took great pains to please them—though in spite of the importunities of Marie de Médicis, the long friendship with Henrietta Maria, his early flirtation with the lovely Spaniard, his earnest and impolitic championship of the notorious Lady Purbeck—Romish convert and adventuress—Venetia, it seems, remained his only love. He was never the mere gallant. He treated women as his intellectual equals, but as equals who had to be splendidly entertained and amused. His conversation was "ingeniose and innocent." Lloyd speaks of "the grace wherewith he could relate magnarum rerum minutias, the little circumstances of great matters." But men were at his feet as well; and on his tour among Italian courts, one of the grandees said that, "having no children, he was very willing his wife should bring him a Prince by Sir Kenelme, whom he imagined the just measure of perfection."
A first-rate swordsman, yet was he "not apt in the least to give offence." His strength was that of a giant. Bristol related that one day at Sherborne he took up "a midling man," chair and all, with one arm. But there was nothing of the swashbuckler about him, and his endless vitality was matched by his courtesy. True, he hustled a Pope; but he addressed the Short Parliament in such reverential terms as no Roundhead could have found. One who had been courtier, exile, naval commander, student, prisoner, and diplomatist, who had associated with all sorts of persons, from kings to alchemists and cooks, had learnt resourcefulness. But he was never too hard put to it perhaps, seeing that "if he had not fourpence, wherever he came he would find respect and credit." "No man knew better how to abound, and to be abased, and either was indifferent to him."
He had his detractors. One who plays so many parts incites envy and ridicule; and he laid himself particularly open to both. Fantasy was in the Digby blood; and that agility of mind and nerve that turns now here, now there, to satisfy an unquenchable curiosity, that exuberance of mental spirits that forces to rapid and continuous expression, has ever been suspect of the English mind. He was "highly caressed in France." To Evelyn Sir Kenelm was a "teller of strange things," and again the Diarist called him "an errant mountebank"—though Evelyn sought his society, and was grateful for its stimulus. Lady Fanshawe, who met him at Calais, at the Governor's table, says he "enlarged somewhat more in extraordinary stories than might be averred.... That was his infirmity, though otherwise a person of most excellent parts, and a very fine bred gentleman." "A certain eccentricity and unsteadiness perhaps inseparable from a mind of such vanity," is Lodge's criticism. "The Pliny of our age for lying," quoth Stubbes. But Digby's extraordinary stories were by no means all false. He may have talked sometimes to épater le bourgeois; but his serious statements were often judged as were the wonders of evolution by country audiences in the seventies.