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[Illustration: Sir Kenelm Digby Knight. After the Painting by Sir Anthony
Vandyke in His Majesty's Collection at Windsor Castle]

THE CLOSET OF SIR KENELM DIGBY KNIGHT OPENED:

NEWLY EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTION, NOTES, AND GLOSSARY, BY ANNE MACDONELL

LONDON: PHILIP LEE WARNER
38 ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 1910

The design on the front binding of this volume reproduces a contemporary
Binding (possibly by le Gascon?) from the library of the Author, whose arms
it embodies.

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION ix

THE CLOSET OF SIR KENELM DIGBY OPENED:
TITLE PAGE OF THE FIRST EDITION 1
TO THE READER 3
RECEIPTS FOR MEAD, METHEGLIN, AND OTHER DRINKS 5
COOKERY RECEIPTS 111
THE TABLE 263

APPENDIX I. SOME ADDITIONAL RECEIPTS 271
II. THE POWDER OF SYMPATHY 272
III. LIST OF THE HERBS, FLOWERS, &C.,
REFERRED TO IN THE TEXT 274

NOTES 277

GLOSSARY 283

INDEX OF RECEIPTS 287

_The frontispiece is a reproduction in photogravure after the portrait of
Sir Kenelm Digby by Sir Anthony Vandyke in His Majesty's Collection at
Windsor Castle, by permission._

INTRODUCTION

With the waning of Sir Kenelm Digby's philosophic reputation his name has
not become obscure. It stands, vaguely perhaps, but permanently, for
something versatile and brilliant and romantic. He remains a perpetual type
of the hero of romance, the double hero, in the field of action and the
realm of the spirit. Had he lived in an earlier age he would now be a
mythological personage; and even without the looming exaggeration and
glamour of myth he still imposes. The men of to-day seem all of little
stature, and less consequence, beside the gigantic creature who made his
way with equal address and audacity in courts and councils, laboratories
and ladies' bowers.

So when, in a seventeenth-century bookseller's advertisement, I lighted on
a reference to the curious compilation of receipts entitled _The Closet of
Sir Kenelm Digby Opened_, having the usual idea of him as a great
gentleman, romantic Royalist, and somewhat out-of-date philosopher, I was
enough astonished at seeing his name attached to what seemed to me, in my
ignorance, outside even his wide fields of interest, to hunt for the book
without delay, examine its contents, and inquire as to its authenticity. Of
course I found it was not unknown. Though the _Dictionary of National
Biography_ omits any reference to it, and its name does not occur in Mr.
Carew Hazlitt's _Old Cookery Books_, Dr. Murray quotes it in his great
Dictionary, and it is mentioned and discussed in _The Life of Digby by One
of his Descendants_. But Mr. Longueville treats it therein with too scant
deference. One of a large and interesting series of contemporary books of
the kind, its own individual interest is not small; and I commend it with
confidence to students of seventeenth-century domestic manners. To
apologise for it, to treat it as if it were some freak, some unowned sin of
Digby's, would be the greatest mistake. On the contrary, its connection
with his life and career is of the closest; and I make bold to assert that
of all his works, with the doubtful exception of his _Memoirs_, it is the
one best worth reprinting. It is in no spirit of irony that I say of him
who in his own day was looked on almost as Bacon's equal, who was the
friend of Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Harvey, Ben Jonson, Cromwell, and all
the great spirits of his time, the intimate of kings, and the special
friend of queens, that his memory should be revived for his skill in making
drinks, and his interest in his own and other folks' kitchens. If to the
magnificent and protean Sir Kenelm must now be added still another side, if
he must appear not only as gorgeous Cavalier, inmate of courts,
controversialist, man of science, occultist, privateer, conspirator, lover
and wit, but as _bon viveur_ too, he is not the ordinary _bon viveur_, who
feasts at banquets prepared by far away and unconsidered menials. His
interest in 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 L3000 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 unlikely
that some of Allen's books were among his collection at Paris sold after
his death by the King of France.

But Kenelm was restlessly longing to taste life outside academic circles,
and already 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 Medicis, 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 the secret of the Powder
of Sympathy, which cured wounds without contact. The friar who had refused
to divulge the secret to the Grand Duke confided it to him--of which more
hereafter.

From Florence he passed to Spain; and his arrival was happily
timed--probably by his ever anxious kinsman; for a few days later Prince
Charles and Buckingham landed, on the Spanish Marriage business; and so
agreeable was young Digby that, in spite of Buckingham's dislike of his
name, he became part of the Prince's household, and returned with the party
in October, 1623. Court favours seemed now to open out a career for him.
King James knighted him, in what might have proved a fatal ceremony; for so
tremblingly nervous of the naked steel was the royal hand, that Buckingham
had to turn the sword aside from doing damage instead of honour. He was
also made Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Prince Charles. But no other
signal favours followed these. For all his agreeableness he was not of the
stuff courtiers are made of--though James had a kindness for him, and was
entertained by his eagerness and ingenuity. Bacon, too, just before his
death, had come across this zealous young student of the experimental
methods, and had meant, Digby said, to include an account of the Powder of
Sympathy in an appendix to his _Natural History_.

In Spain, Kenelm had flirted with some Spanish ladies, notably with the
beautiful Donna Anna Maria Manrique, urged thereto by gibes at his
coldness; but Venetia was still the lady of his heart. Her amorous
adventures, in the meanwhile, had been more serious and much more
notorious. His letters had miscarried, and had been kept back by his
mother. Venetia pleaded her belief in his death. Aubrey's account of her is
a mass of picturesque scandal. "She was a most beautiful desirable
creature.... The young eagles had espied her, and she was sanguine and
tractable, and of much suavity (which to abuse was great pittie)." Making
all allowance for gossip, the truth seems to be that in Kenelm's absence
she had been at least the mistress of Sir Edward Sackville, afterwards the
fourth Earl of Dorset; that Dorset tired of her; and on Digby's return she
was more than willing to return to her old love. But, alas! Sackville had
her picture, which seemed to her compromising. Digby, therefore, having
accepted her apologies and extenuations, challenged Sackville to a duel;
whereupon the faithless one proved at least magnanimous; refused to fight,
gave up the picture, and swore that Venetia was blameless as she was fair.
A private marriage followed; and it was only on the birth of his second son
John that Sir Kenelm acknowledged it to the world. To read nearly all his
_Memoirs_ is to receive the impression that he looked on his wife as a
wronged innocent. To read the whole is to feel he knew the truth and took
the risk, which was not very great after all; for the lady of the many
suitors and several adventures settled down to the mildest domesticity.
They say he was jealous; but no one has said she gave him cause. The tale
runs that Dorset visited them once a year, and "only kissed her hand, Sir
Kenelm being by."

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 naively 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 Re, 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."

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