and died in the first year of the Protectorate, 1654. I cannot discover the date of Castara's death; but she died some years before her husband, leaving only one son.
There is one among the poems of the second part of Castara, which I cannot pass without remark; it is the Elegy which Habington addressed to his wife, on the death of her friend, Venetia Digby, the consort of the famous Sir Kenelm Digby. She was the most beautiful woman of her time: even Lord Clarendon steps aside from the gravity of history, to mention "her extraordinary beauty, and as extraordinary fame." Her picture at Windsor is, indeed, more like a vision of ideal loveliness, than any form that ever trod the earth.[54] She was descended from the Percies and the Stanleys, and was first cousin to Habington's Castara, their mothers being sisters. The magnificent spirit of her enamoured husband, surrounded her with the most gorgeous adornments that ever were invented by vanity or luxury: and thus she was, one day, found dead on her couch, her hand supporting her head, in the attitude of one asleep. Habington's description exactly agrees with the picture at Althorpe, painted after her death by Vandyke.
What's honour but a hatchment? what is here
Of Percy left, or Stanley, names most dear
To virtue?
Or what avails her that she once was led
A glorious bride to valiant Digby's bed?
She, when whatever rare
The either Indies boast, lay richly spread
For her to wear, lay on her pillow dead!
There is no piercing the mystery which hangs round the story of this beautiful creature: that a stigma rested on her character, and that she was exculpated from it, whatever it might be, seems proved, by the doves and serpents introduced into several portraits of her; the first, emblematical of her innocence, and the latter, of her triumph over slander: and not less, by these lines of Habington. If Venetia Digby had been, as Aubrey and others insinuate, abandoned to profligacy, and a victim to her husband's jealousy, Habington would scarce have considered her noble descent and relationship to his Castara as a matter of pride; or her death as a subject of tender condolence; or the awful manner of it a peculiar blessing of heaven, and the reward of her virtues.
Come likewise, my Castara, and behold
What blessings ancient prophecy foretold,
Bestow'd on her in death; she past away
So sweetly from the world as if her clay
Lay only down to slumber. Then forbear
To let on her blest ashes fall a tear;
Or if thou'rt too much woman, softly weep,
Lest grief disturb the silence of her sleep!
The author of the introduction to the curious Memoirs of Sir Kenelm Digby, has proved the absolute falsehood of some of Aubrey's assertions, and infers the improbability of others. But these beautiful lines by Habington, seem to have escaped his notice; and they are not slight evidence in Venetia's favour. On the whole, the mystery remains unexplained; a cloud has settled for ever on the true story of this extraordinary creature. Neither the pen nor the sword of her husband could entirely clear her fame in her own age: he could only terrify slander into silence, and it died away into an indistinct murmur, of which the echo alone has reached our time.—But this is enough:—the echo of an echo could whisper into naught a woman's fair name. The idea of a creature so formed in the prodigality of nature; so completely and faultlessly beautiful; so nobly born and allied; so capable (as she showed herself on various occasions,) of high generous feeling,[55] of delicacy,[56] of fortitude,[57] of tenderness;[58] depraved by her own vices, or "done to death by slanderous tongues," is equally painful and heart-sickening. The image of the asp trailing its slime and its venom over the bosom of Cleopatra, is not more abhorrent.
FOOTNOTES:
[52] It was the mother of William Habington who addressed to her brother, Lord Mounteagle, that extraordinary letter which led to the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot.
Nash's History of Worcestershire.
[53] The family seat of the Habingtons, in Worcestershire.