Digby was at Oxford, mainly under Thomas Allen, mathematician and astronomer, from 1618 to 1620.
Kenelm Digby, wearing a suit of armour (anonymous portrait, after one by Anthony van Dyck).
Kenelm Digby by Anthony van Dyck.
Kenelm Digby, wearing a suit of armour (anonymous portrait, after one by Anthony van Dyck).
Kenelm Digby by Anthony van Dyck.
Digby was at Oxford, mainly under Thomas Allen, mathematician and astronomer, from 1618 to 1620.
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1669
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Kenelm Digby was born on July 11, 1603 in Gayhurst, England. He was the son of Sir Everard Digby, executed in 1606 for complicity in the Gunpowder Plot, and of Mary Mulsho of Gayhurst. In 1617 he accompanied his uncle John Digby (later the first earl of Bristol) on a diplomatic mission to Spain.
Digby was at Oxford, mainly under Thomas Allen, mathematician and astronomer, from 1618 to 1620.
In 1620 Digby set off on a tour of Europe, to France, Italy, and Spain. On his return in 1623 Digby was knighted, presumably for his share, while in Spain, in entertaining Prince Charles and the duke of Buckingham.
In 1627 Digby set off on a privateering mission to the Mediterranean that involved a dramatic but scandalous attack on Venetian shipping off Scanderoon (Alexandretta; now Iskenderun); this won him considerable fame and financial rewards. Probably in the hope of preferment he was converted to Anglicanism in 1630 but returned to Catholicism on the death of his wife in 1633.
His wife’s death led Digby to give up his gay public life for study. He had already interested himself in literature, alchemy, and religion; and now he turned to writing seriously upon these subjects. He had settled in France, where he met Hobbes and Mersenne, corresponded with Descartes (whom he visited in Holland), and was in close touch with other English Catholics in semiexile.
Digby frequently visited England and, aside from a brief imprisonment in 1642, was free to come and go, in spite of his overt royalism. He became chancellor to the widow of Charles I, Queen Henrietta Maria, and undertook a diplomatic mission to the pope on her behalf; he also twice (1648, 1654-1655) tried to negotiate with Cromwell for toleration of Catholics. In the intervals he wrote on natural philosophy (the Two Treatises), religion, and literature; collected books and manuscripts; and collected medical, chemical, and household recipes, which he exchanged with others.
In 1657 his increasingly poor health led Digby to take the waters at Montpellier, where he gave his famous account of the “powder of sympathy,” which cured wounds by being rubbed on the weapon that inflicted them. It was a strong solution of vitriol (copper sulfate) in rainwater, which could be improved by drying in the sun and by mixture with gum tragacanth. It worked by a combination of occult and natural powers, that is, by attraction and by the small material particles given off by all objects.
In the same year Digby corresponded with the mathematicians Fermat, Wallis, and Brouncker, serving as intermediary in a dispute concerning Anglo-French priority rather than mathematical fact. After this Digby undertook a long journey through Germany and Scandinavia and thence, at the Restoration, home to England. His Discourse Concerning the Vegetation of Plants discusses germination, nutrition, and growth of plants in chemical and mechanical terms; he finds that saltpeter nourishes plants and concludes that, as “the Cosmopolite” (Alexander Seton, a late sixteenth century alchemist) had said, there is in air a food of life (saltpeter or niter) and an attractive power for this salt in the plant.
Digby’s most important piece of work is the first of the Two Treatises, “Of Bodies.” Here he displays a clarity and logic of approach that show his appreciation of Descartes. In this work, which deals with both inanimate and animate bodies, he begins with basic definitions. The fundamental properties of bodies are quantity, density, and rarity; and from them motion arises. He discusses motion extensively but qualitatively, although with many admiring references to Galileo’s Two New Sciences (1638), which not many had read in 1644; he includes Galileo’s statement of the law of falling bodies but criticizes Galileo for taking too narrow and strictly functional a view (as Descartes also criticized him). Light is material and in motion; it is in fact fire and can exert pressure, so that when it strikes a body, small particles are carried off with it.
Digby’s particles, which he sometimes calls atoms, are not fully characterized; they seem neither Epicurean nor Cartesian but certainly are mechanical. The weakness of the work is the lack of precision and definition; this is a general view of natural philosophy, and an interesting one, but Digby had not the ability to explore his subject deeply. Hence, although his book was widely read, it appealed to the virtuoso rather than to the scientist. As a virtuoso himself, Digby may well have intended this, especially in view of the second of Two Treatises, “Of Man’s Soul.”
During the 1630s, Digby owned a glassworks and manufactured wine bottles which were globular in shape with a high, tapered neck, a collar, and a punt. His manufacturing technique involved a coal furnace, made hotter than usual by the inclusion of a wind tunnel, and a higher ratio of sand to potash and lime than was customary. Digby's technique produced wine bottles which were stronger and more stable than most of their day, and which, due to their dark color protected the contents from light.
Kenelm Digby's many achievements have counted for little in themselves, and yet his direct influence was great, even though not measurable, and never greater than as a stimulus to science and learning. He is England's primary illustration of the change from the virtuoso standards of the Renaissance to the specialist standards of modern times. He possessed for the time a considerable knowledge of natural science, and is said to have been the first to explain the necessity of oxygen to the existence of plants.
Digby left behind a library of several thousand books, countless letters and journals, and a fictionalised account of his adventures in elaborately flowery style.
Digby is also considered the father of the modern wine bottle.
Digby was brought up a Catholic. Abroad he proselytized actively for the Roman Catholic Church.
Digby was one of those suggested as a member of the new philosophical society that soon became the Royal Society.
Digby was enormously admired in his own day for the fascination of his personality, the flamboyance of his early life, the romance of his love for Venetia, his position in society, and his undoubted intellectual powers. He was at once a lover of the occult and one who appreciated the new trends in natural philosophy. He never completely emancipated himself from traditional Aristotelianism, influenced, perhaps, by his conscious Catholicism and friendship for the English priest and writer Thomas White; yet he read and praised Descartes, Gassendi, and Galileo and could write as scornfully of the “Schoolmen” as they did.
He was in touch with the leading intellectuals of the time, and was highly regarded by them. Edward Hyde, who was one of his intimate friends, describes him as "a man of very extraordinary person and presence which drew the eyes of all men upon him, a wonderful graceful behaviour, a flowing courtesy and civility, and such a volubility of language as surprised and delighted.
According to John Aubrey, he was "the most accomplished cavalier of his time."
Physical Characteristics: Digby was a man of great stature and bodily strength.
About 1620 Kenelm involved himself intensely in a love affair, ultimately ending in marriage, with "that celebrated beauty and courtesan" Venetia Stanley; five children were born, the marriage being made public after the birth of the second in 1627.
