The page from Kenelm Digby’s journey describing the sea battle that he fought at the Turkish port of Scanderoon
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Epub ISBN: 9781448185566
Version 1.0
Published by William Heinemann 2016
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Copyright © Joe Moshenska, 2016
Joe Moshenska has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by William Heinemann
William Heinemann
The Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA
www.penguin.co.uk
William Heinemann is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780434022892
For Rosa
Socia itineris mei
1. Page from Kenelm Digby’s journal
(National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 417D, p. 67. By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales)
2. Sir Kenelm Digby, engraving after Anthony van Dyck
(Wikimedia Commons)
3. Venetia Digby on her deathbed, by Anthony van Dyck
(1633, oil on canvas, 74.3 x 81.8 cm, DPG194. By Permission of the Trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery, London)
4. Kenelm Digby’s monogram
(from R. Smith, Brief treatyse settynge forth divers truthes . . .; The British Library)
5. A miniature portrait of Venetia
(Walters Museum of Art, Baltimore)
6. The key to Loose Fantasies
(The British Library, MS Harley 6758, f.4v)
7. The Brazen Head
(From the title page of Robert Greene, The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon, and Frier Bongay [London, 1630]; The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford)
8. Gayhurst (‘Gothurst’) House, Buckinghamshire
(courtesy Laurence Worms, Ash Rare Books)
9. Kenelm’s horoscope
(MS Ashmole 174, f.75r; The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford)
10. Sir John Digby
(Alamy)
11. Anonymous portrait of Thomas Allen
(Reproduced by kind permission of the President and Fellows of Trinity College, Oxford)
12. Maria de’ Medici by Peter Paul Rubens
(Alamy)
13. Manuscript page of Petrarch’s poems
(MS Digby 141, p.1; The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford)
14. Treatise on geomancy
(MS Digby 50, f.93; The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford)
15. Learned oration delivered before the Accademia dei Filomati
(The British Library, MS Additional 41846, f.136v)
16. Dedication page showing portrait of young Kenelm
(from Bonaventura Pistofilo, Oplomachia; The British Library)
17. George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham by Michiel Jansz
van Miereveld (Alamy)
18. Kenelm’s privateering commission
(MS Egerton 2541, f.91;The British Library)
19. Page from Kenelm’s journal
(National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 417D, p.1. By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales)
20. Map from Historie of the Holy Warre by Thomas Fuller
(Reproduced by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge)
21. Map of Algiers
(from Civitate orbis terrarum; reproduced by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge)
22. A Muslim woman
(from Nicolas de Nicolay, Les Navigations Peregrinations et Voyages, faicts en la Turquie; reproduced by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge)
23. A diagram from a Persian compendium of linguistic sciences, showing the human tongue
(St John’s College, Oxford, MS 122, f.4b)
24. Fragments of Arabic poetry and recipes
(St John’s College, Oxford, MS 175, f.44a)
25. Letter from Kenelm to Edward, Viscount Conway
(The National Archives, Kew)
26. Letter from Kenelm to Venetia
(Derbyshire Record Office, Matlock; reproduced by permission of the Derbyshire County Council)
27. The port of Scanderoon, viewed from the sea
(from M. Corneille le Bruyn, A Voyage to the Levant; reproduced by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge)
28. A page from Loose Fantasies
(The British Library, MS Harley 6758, f.45r)
29. Drawing of the inscribed monument from Delos
(from John Selden De Synedriis & Praefecturis Iuridicis veterum Ebraeorum Liber Secundus; reproduced by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge)
30. Page from Persian encyclopedia of the sciences
(St John’s College, Oxford, MS 33, p.1)
31. Roger Bacon’s Perspectiva
(MS Digby 77, f.1r; The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford)
32. Engraving of Covent Garden Square in the seventeenth-century, by Wenceslaus Hollar (©Trustees of the British Museum)
33. The garden and ruined church, Christ Church, Newgate Street, London.
Author’s photograph
Digby, Everard (c.1578-1606). Kenelm’s father: tall, handsome, elegant and multi-talented, with a weakness for convoluted schemes and a tendency to place too much faith in his friends.
Digby, George (1612-77). Son of the Earl of Bristol, he has spent much of his childhood in the Spanish court and is fluent in its language and customs. Shares many of his distant cousin Kenelm’s enthusiasms from literature to astrology.
Digby, John (1605-45). Kenlm’s younger brother. Shorter and more heavily built than his older sibling, John lacks something of Kenelm’s appetite for learning but more than makes up for it with immense physical strength and prowess with a blade.
Digby, John, later Earl of Bristol (1580-1653). Kenelm’s distant relative and patron. One of the king’s most valued diplomats, entirely au fait with the delicate ins-and-outs of court life, he brings Kenelm along on the young man’s first trips into Europe. Transformed in Loose Fantasies into Aristobulus.
Digby, Kenelm (1603-65). The protagonist: a young man of many talents and with a voracious appetite for knowledge and new experiences, struggling to find his place in the world and escape the memory of his father’s treasonous death. Transformed in Loose Fantasies into Theagenes.
Digby, Mary, née Mushlo (c.1581-1653). Kenelm’s mother: she was originally more pious than her husband and inspired his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Following his execution she has devoted herself to a devout and cloistered life. Transformed in Loose Fantasies into Arete.
Digby, Venetia, née Stanley (1600-33). Kenelm’s childhood sweetheart, of great beauty, fine character, and rare intelligence. She constantly finds herself beset by rumour and gossip of the most base and malicious sort. Transformed in Loose Fantasies into Stelliana.
Dyve, Lewis (1599-1669). Stepson to the Earl of Bristol, he is more interested in the women of Madrid than in the political and religious debates to be found there. Transformed in Loose Fantasies into Leodivius.
Stanley, Sir William (date of birth unknown, d.1629). A spendthrift Catholic gentleman, father of Venetia. Transformed in Loose Fantasies into Nearchus.
Allen, Thomas (c.1540-1632). An aged and hugely learned Roman Catholic antiquarian and book collector, based in Gloucester Hall, Oxford, around whom a circle of brilliant young mathematicians frequently gathered.
Aubrey, John (1626-97). An eclectic polymath and pioneering biographer who pieced together detailed lives of Kenelm and Venetia among many others.
Bristol, Earl of. See Digby, John, later Earl of Bristol.
Buckingham, Duke of. See Villiers, George, later Duke of Buckingham.
Capello, Antonio (dates uncertain). A grizzled and experienced Venetian captain, he has been given command of the galleasses and galleys near the port of Scanderoon and tasked with ensuring that trade there continue uninterrupted.
Cervantes, Miguel de (1547-1616). After losing a hand in the Battle of Lepanto and spending years enslaved in Algiers, he produced a series of magnificent works crowned by his novel Don Quixote.
Charles I. See Stuart, Charles.
Coke, Sir John (1563-1644). An adept administrator who had devoted his life to expunging ingrained and widespread naval corruption. He is the client of Fulke Greville, poet and politician, one of the last great Elizabethans.
Contarini, Alvise (1597-1651). Venetian ambassador to England, he reports court gossip and political events back to his masters, the Doge and Senate of Venice, and defends the Venetian Republic’s interests in England.
Dallam, Thomas (c.1575-c.1630). An expert organ maker who, in 1599, made a voyage to Constantinople with a gift from Elizabeth I to the Sultan, and kept a detailed voyage of his travels.
Drake, Sir Francis (1540-1596). To the English, the greatest naval hero of the Elizabethan age, and heroic defeater of the Armada; to the Spanish, a scurrilous and godless pirate.
Frizell, James (dates uncertain). The Levant Company’s semi-official agent in Algiers, he knows both the opportunities and dangers of North African life, and is the first to suffer for the offences of English ships.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). The greatest astronomer and scientist of the age, renowned for his discovery of the moons of Jupiter. More controversial for his suspected support for Copernicus’s heliocentrism, and the revival of ancient atomism.
Heliodorus (dates uncertain, 3rd-4th Century CE?). An ancient Greek writer of whose life little is known. His great work, the rambling and complex novel Aethiopica, was rediscovered in a Hungarian monastery in 1526. Inspired later writers from Cervantes to modern novelists.
Howard, Thomas, Earl of Arundel (1585-1646). An austere and cultured nobleman, a rival and sworn enemy of the Duke of Buckingham, and the greatest collector and connoisseur of ancient and modern European art in England.
Howell, James (c.1594-1666). A well-travelled and curious young man who has witnessed the workings of Venice and Madrid. One of Kenelm’s closest and most loyal friends, with a rather ill-advised tendency to intervene in duels.
James I. See Stuart, James.
Jonson, Ben (1572-1637). The greatest poet and playwright living in England, growing corpulent in his old age and surrounding himself with young acolytes and imitators, on the look out for a dashing young patron.
Laud, William (1573-1645). The rising star in the English church, becoming Bishop of London in 1628 and Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. His love of ceremony and religious splendour matches King Charles’s, and he is fascinated by Greek and Arabic learning.
Matthew, Tobie (1577-1655). The charismatic son of an archbishop and a convert to Catholicism, who has spent much of his life enjoying the pleasures of Florence surrounded by friends and admirers.
Medici, Maria de’ (1575-1642). A member of the famous Florentine dynasty who married King Henri IV of France in her youth, following his death she entered into a series of schemes and plots, some directed against her young son, Louis XIII. Transformed in Loose Fantasies into The Queen of Attica.
Napier, Richard (1559-1634). A priest, chemical physician and expert astrologer, given to speaking with Angels. His book-lined rectory at Great Linford is not far from the Digby home of Gayhurst.
Nicholas, Sir Edward (1593-1669). Buckingham’s secretary and loyal servant, who will do everything he can to thwart a young adventurer’s ambitions when his master commands him.
Petty, William (1587-1639). The Earl of Arundel’s agent in the Levant, he will stop at nothing to obtain the most rare and valuable pieces of ancient art.
Raleigh, Sir Walter (1554-1618). A heroic poet-adventurer during Elizabeth’s reign, he fell from favour once King James made peace with Spain. After years of imprisonment in the Tower of London, where he conducted chemical experiments, he was finally executed.
Roe, Sir Thomas (1581-1644). Following a globetrotting earlier life that took him to Guyana and India, he spent the years 1621-8 as King James’s ambassador to the Sultan’s court in Constantinople, departing mere weeks before Kenelm’s arrival at Scanderoon. A fervent Puritan.
Sidney, Sir Philip (1554-86). One of the great heroes of the Elizabethan age, the consummate courtier and author of the masterpieces Arcadia and Astrophil and Stella, he died young while fighting in the Low Countries.
da Sosa, Antonio (dates uncertain). A Portugese priest, he spent many years as a slave in Algiers at the same time as his countryman Miguel de Cervantes, and wrote at length of his impressions of the city.
Spenser, Edmund (c.1552-1599). The author of one of the greatest, longest and most complex of Elizabethan poems, The Faerie Queene, a sprawling romance mixing imaginative digression, political commentary and arcane philosophy.
Stradling, Edward (c.1600-1644). A Welsh gentleman from a well-known and cultured family, he is second-in-command on Kenelm’s voyage and shares his love for abstruse verse.
Stradling, Henry (exact date of birth unknown, d. c.1649). An officer and younger brother to Edward.
Stuart, Charles, later King Charles I (1600-49). A nervous and hesitant young man, who grew up in the shadow of his charismatic older brother Henry and his father’s favourite, George Villiers, before his travels in Spain allowed him to form his own convictions and determine the kind of king he intended to be. Transformed in Loose Fantasies into The Prince of Morea.
Stuart, James, King James I & VI of England and Scotland (1566-1625). A monarch who sees himself as a philosopher and strives to be the peacemaker of Europe, overcoming violent religious divisions in part through carefully chosen dynastic marriages for his children. George Villiers is the latest of a series of beautiful young men to capture his affections. Transformed in Loose Fantasies into The King of Morea.
Van Dyck, Anthony (1599-1641). A Flemish painter and expert portraitist, he first visited England in 1620-21 and returned in 1632, when he quickly became Kenelm’s close friend and the most renowned artist in the court.
Villiers, George, later Duke of Buckingham (1592-1628). The beloved favourite of King James I and closest friend of James’s son, Charles. Devastatingly handsome and elegant but with a short temper and propensity to take political manoeuvres as personal insults. Transformed in Loose Fantasies into Hephaestion.
Wake, Sir Isaac (1580-1632). English ambassador to Venice during the period of Kenelm’s voyage. An urbane diplomat with a taste for lavish spending.
Winthrop, John Sr. (1588-1649). A Puritan who, after becoming increasingly disillusioned by the direction of English religious change, is determined to emigrate to New England. Founder of Connecticut.
Winthrop, John Jr. (1606-76). A pious young man with a passion for alchemy and the arcane learning of eastern lands, he decided to travel into the Mediterranean in search of secret wisdom before traveling with his father to New England. Later governor of Connecticut.
Wotton, Henry (1568-1639). Former English ambassador to Venice, an expert on Italian art, architecture and customs, and first biographer of the Duke of Buckingham.
Wyche, Peter (exact date of birth unknown, d.1643). Thomas Roe’s successor as King James’s ambassador to the Sultan’s court in Constantinople.
JUST BEFORE DAWN on 5 June 1665, a terribly sick man sat in his chambers on the north side of Covent Garden Square and readied himself for a long journey. Approaching his sixty-second birthday, Sir Kenelm Digby had outlived many of those closest to him, and for some months he had realised that his own days were drawing to a close. His mind was as active as ever, but his body was failing: the imposing frame that had seen him loom over his contemporaries had been bent double by spasms of pain running through his abdomen and his long limbs.1 He had drawn up his will, written in his gorgeous, looping handwriting, and as June began he prepared to depart from London.2 The large and rambling set of rooms in which Kenelm sat, and which he steeled himself to leave behind, were packed with reminders of what he had lost, and of what he had experienced and achieved.3 The sumptuous foreign furnishings, such as the ‘spanish tables’, richly patterned Turkish carpets, tapestries and damask-clad chairs dotted throughout, were a mark not only of cosmopolitan taste, but of a lifetime spent zigzagging between England and the furthest corners of Europe. Five years previously, following the restoration of Charles II to the throne, Kenelm had been one of many notable English exiles who returned to England from Paris, but even among this nomadic crowd he was distinguished by his restlessness. He had seen the splendours of the Spanish court as a boy of fourteen on his first foreign jaunt; he had sampled the intellectual and artistic delights of Tuscany and Rome, mixing with scholars, cardinals, and even the Pope; he had ventured through the colder expanses of Northern Europe, exploring Germany and even the fringes of Scandinavia. His had been a life made up of travels, of incessant enquiry and discovery, but this appeared likely to be his final journey.
As dawn broke, a knock at the door announced the arrival of George Hartmann, Kenelm’s steward and assistant.4 Hartmann explained that a horse-drawn litter was waiting for his master in the elegant arcade that ran beneath his building facing on to the square. As Hartmann left his master to his final preparations, Kenelm slowly rose and surveyed the splendid walls of the great room in which he stood. Looming over him, their dark depths gradually revealed by candlelight and the first hint of the summer sun, were a number of imposing paintings, to which Kenelm had clung throughout his travels. He cherished them in part for the hand that had executed them – that of his dear friend Anthony van Dyck, who had electrified the English court in the 1630s with the poise and lustre of his compositions – and in part for what they depicted. There were a series of intense religious scenes – Christ taken down from the Cross,5 St John the Baptist in the wilderness, Mary Magdalene transported with ecstasy by the singing of a heavenly choir – an immediate reminder of Kenelm’s piety, and of the religion into which he had been born. This was the religion for which, when Kenelm was a tiny boy, his father had been willing to commit treason and suffer an appalling death – he was hanged, drawn and quartered in the churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral; the religion in which Kenelm’s mother Mary had insisted on raising her two sons in the face of overwhelming hostility; the religion to which his wife Venetia had remained faithful until the dreadful night in 1633 when she died suddenly in her sleep. The solemn glow of the paintings was not just comforting for Kenelm, however, but chastising. He had never rested comfortably with the faith in and for which his parents, his brother and his wife had lived and died; he had struggled to bring his idiosyncratic mind into line with its orthodoxies and its authorities.
There, in the midst of these pious scenes and frozen in place by the magic of van Dyck’s brushstrokes, was Venetia herself on her deathbed, her features as still as marble. Her head was propped on her wrist as if she was only slumbering, and her left eye was very slightly open, holding out the impossible promise that she might still wake. Nearby, resting on a low table, lay other chilling relics, the plaster casts of her face, hands and feet taken in the hours after her body was found, as if she could be extracted from time, her fragments petrified and retained.6 A mile away, in Christ Church on Newgate, stood the funeral monument that he had ordered to be built after her death, but here in his rooms he had constructed a different kind of shrine.
Around these paintings, and framing their pious glow, loomed numerous shelves of books, all that remained of the magnificent collections that had once been his. Some he had lost amidst the turbulence of the times – he had left a splendid library behind in London once before which was destroyed by Parliamentary troops, while the bulk of the new collection that he had painstakingly assembled while in exile remained in Paris, too bulky and expensive to transport.7 He had not only lost books, however: in the words of his first biographer, John Aubrey, Kenelm ‘was very generous, and liberall to deserving persons.8’ He gave volumes away to his friends, to those he admired, and especially to the great libraries that sprang up in his lifetime: an astonishing treasure trove of medieval manuscripts, a bequest from his own teacher and mentor, to the Bodleian in Oxford; and an expensive set of theological tomes to the newly founded Puritan institution of Harvard in distant New England. Even after so many books had been lost and given away, though, the shelves that lined his London chambers still held thousands. These were not merely dusty authorities for Kenelm, but living, breathing presences. ‘My books,’ he wrote, ‘[are] my faithful and never failing companions.9’ Even their covers became miniature memorials, the spines stamped with a monogram in which the letters ‘K’, ‘D’ and ‘V’ were intermingled, Kenelm and Venetia Digby entwined together in perpetuity.
In pride of place were the books that Kenelm himself had written, giving full rein to his expansive mind. The Earl of Clarendon, who knew him well, wrote that Kenelm possessed ‘such a volubility of language, as surprised and delighted’, and Aubrey called him ‘master of a good and gracefull, judicious stile’: words flowed unstoppably from Kenelm’s mouth and from his pen throughout his life. Among the shelf of volumes that he had authored were musings on the mysteries of theology; his philosophical magnum opus, the Two Treatises on the nature of body and soul, in which he explored the fundamentals of the physical and metaphysical realms; and, most recently, his botanical treatise A Discourse Concerning the Vegetation of Plants, which he had read before the newly formed Royal Society two years previously following his election as a fellow. On the shelf below his own writings, his eyes rested on those of the great men whom he had befriended and with whom he had conversed and debated: the philosophical musings of René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes; the dizzyingly complex work of Pierre de Fermat, the greatest mathematician of the age; and the writings of Ben Jonson, including a magnificent series of poems dedicated to Venetia’s memory, which Kenelm had helped to edit following the playwright’s death. Below and beyond the achievements of his illustrious friends, Kenelm surveyed the hundreds of other volumes by writers ancient and modern: huge tomes and tiny pocketbooks, printed texts and meticulously handwritten manuscripts, poems, tales of adventure, great works on religion, philosophy and science, written in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Arabic and Latin. These were pages in which Kenelm had not only felt the thrumming and the pulsing of the past, but had also found the inspiration and the resources for the life that he had lived.
Footsteps echoing up the stairwell announced the imminent arrival of his most trusted servants, two men named George Hangmaster and Mr Aurelius, who were coming to help Kenelm descend to the waiting litter and out into the London morning. He turned from the shelves and shuffled slowly towards the doorway, glancing as he went into the adjoining chambers. In them he glimpsed the sparkle of polished tin, copper and glass as the rising sun entered his well-stocked kitchen. He employed two cooks – George Hangmaster’s wife Anne, and another named Mrs Brooks – but he had also passed many happy hours labouring in here himself. Wherever he had travelled, Kenelm wasted no opportunity to sample strange and unfamiliar delicacies, and to learn new recipes and techniques which he transcribed and sought to replicate. Now, he surveyed the tools he had assembled for these attempts: pie-plates, syllabub dishes, brass and iron kettles, countless ladles, forks and tongs, scales, graters, colanders, brewing tubs and many more, by means of which a dazzling array of ingredients could be combined, transformed, and sampled.10 His chambers were also fitted out with a well-equipped and fully functioning laboratory, and he could not depart without peering into this room for a final time.11 It was here, right up to his final days, that Kenelm had continued to practise the chemical and alchemical experiments that were also a lifelong obsession: here he heated his furnaces until they would melt sand into glass, from which he deftly fashioned cutting-edge wine bottles and artificial gemstones; here he scorched the bodies of crayfish, in the hope that he could later resurrect them from their ashes. Much of Kenelm’s equipment did double duty in the kitchen and the laboratory, and there was no firm line for him between cookery and chemistry, nor between alchemy and science: all were overlapping ways of understanding, transforming and enjoying the minute and messy particulars of the world around him.
The footsteps arrived at his door, and a tentative knock informed him that the time for departure had arrived. As he limped from his chambers, he paused by the ‘greate writeinge chayre with whings’ next to his desk, in which he had passed much of the preceding weeks setting his affairs in order.12 Sitting for a brief moment, he snatched up the tiny oval portrait of his wife, made for him in Paris decades before, from which Venetia stared with an impassive and unchanging gaze, surrounded by finely wrought loops the colour of emerald and sapphire and tiny white figures bearing swags of fruit and flowers. It was fashioned from gold and painted with enamel, and on the back, in Latin, were inscribed words which painfully reminded Kenelm that no earthly journey he might undertake would have his wife at its end. ‘He tries to snatch a ghost from the funeral pyre and fights a great battle with death,’ they read. ‘Everywhere he searches for thee – O, the bitterness of it – on a piece of metal.13’ As he thrust this memento into his inner pocket with one twisted hand, with the other he reached into the bottom-most drawer of the desk, rummaged beneath a pile of papers, and pulled out a small and unprepossessing volume. Unlike those that lined his shelves, it had no rich binding or embossing; though he had once intended to present it to the world, this work had become Kenelm’s most intimate secret, and it contained the pages on which he had striven to record and to transform his memories, his life, his entire character. A glance at the first page confirmed the title he had once given it, and which he had perused countless times since in private moments: Loose Fantasies. He slipped it into his pocket, and hobbled out into the morning air.
The sixty-two years of Kenelm’s life encompassed one of the most eventful and dizzyingly transformative periods in the history of England, and of the wider world. He was born on 11 July 1603, four months after the death of Queen Elizabeth I and the ascension of James VI of Scotland as James I of England. In 1618, when Kenelm was fifteen, the King’s daughter and son-in-law ill-advisedly agreed to be crowned as monarchs of the eastern European region of Bohemia, thus triggering an all-out religious and political conflict that would devastate much of the Continent for three decades. Changes in England were no less violent and dramatic: James died in 1625 and was succeeded by his son Charles, who faced a revolutionary challenge to his kingship in the Civil Wars of the 1640s, and was executed as a tyrant in 1649. After a decade of republican rule, largely overseen by the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, some five years before Kenelm’s final journey. In a time of repeated upheavals and starkly polarised divisions, Kenelm was one of the few men able to adapt repeatedly to changing circumstances, flourishing amidst the turmoil and winning admiration from all sides in the political, religious and intellectual disputes erupting around him.
The chaos and strife engendered by the age through which Kenelm lived, however, also prompted an astonishing efflorescence in the realms of human thought and endeavour, as men and women strained to come to terms with the horrors and the emerging possibilities that they witnessed. Kenelm observed the birth of modern science and medicine, in Galileo Galilei’s radical new account of the heavens and William Harvey’s argument for the circulation of the blood, and the beginnings of modern philosophy. He experienced an age in which religion was not only becoming violently polarised, but assuming novel forms, from newly founded pious orders to radical utopian sects: a response both to scientific developments, and a rising awareness of the differing religions that proliferated around the world, from China to the indigenous people of North America.
It was a period in which the corners of the earth were increasingly linked by stable trade routes, bringing the exotic splendours of Asia and the Americas into European homes and marketplaces. But if the revolutions in all these areas seemed to point towards a rational and enlightened future, Kenelm also lived during an epoch fixated on, and saturated by, the past: deepening studies of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac and Aramaic opened up new vistas on ancient and distant worlds; the authoritative texts of antiquity and Scripture remained authoritative but were opened up to new forms of scrutiny and scepticism; the rise of archaeology and antiquarianism opened up new appreciations of historical distance and difference; and the most dusty and obscure of scholarly disputes could assume urgently topical and controversial significance. Amidst these wider currents of change, both drawing upon them and influencing them deeply, was the great flourishing of art and literature through which Kenelm lived: he was born into the England of Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson, and by the end of his life Milton, Marvell and Dryden were in the midst of their greatest achievements. He walked through the great cities of Europe whose squares and palaces were being transformed by the creations of Rubens, Velazquez, Poussin and Bernini.
This was an age of reason and superstition, of tolerance and sectarian hate, of fanatical certainty and unmoored scepticism, of stifling authoritarianism and creative freedom, of an iconoclastic desire to open a new future and a nostalgic urge to cling on to tradition. It was an age in which fact and fantasy could blend, intermingle and inform one another – an age when the richest imaginings often assumed something of the solidity of history, and the events of a single life could be elevated from mundane happenings to the lofty heights of myth.
Kenelm Digby, more than any other individual, encapsulates within a single life and character both the sheer thrilling variety of this period in history, and its deepest and most compelling contradictions. He lived his life in constant contact with the harsh facts of political and religious struggle, and of personal loss; yet he also strove constantly to shape these harsh states of affairs through the power not only of his actions, but of his imagination. As well as an omnivorous reader he was an inveterate teller of stories, especially his own. Determined to achieve his ambitions, and to free himself from the burdens of his past, Kenelm realised that the only way to do so was by reinventing himself, making his own life into a compelling tale in which the disparate strands of his identity could be woven together. He was a mutable and kaleidoscopic figure, dancing deftly between an astonishing array of spheres, and living a life that expressed the deepest tensions of the age; yet he knew that he remained utterly singular, in his activities and in his character, and sought every means by which he could display this uniqueness to the world.
These were endeavours that preoccupied Kenelm for his entire life. The small, unprepossessing book that he stuffed into his pocket and took with him when he left Covent Garden in 1665 represented his most daring act of self-transformation, one that had taken place nearly four decades before, during a year-long voyage into the furthest reaches of Europe. Written in the sweltering heat of a Greek island in August 1628, with the noisy festivities of his Muslim hosts, his officers and his crew echoing in the distance, it was the story of his remarkable voyage, but also of his earlier life, of the travails and intimacies of his love for Venetia, of his deepest hopes and desires. He rewrote his own life as a romance, a tale of noble heroes and virtuous heroines, unsettling sorcerers and nefarious seducers, pure virtuous love and unadulterated wickedness. He renamed himself ‘Theagenes’, and his beloved Venetia became ‘Stelliana’, while England became ‘Morea’ and London ‘Corinth’, and every other person and place that had mattered to him assumed a similarly altered guise. He fused the tale of his life with the tales from the books he loved, creating a work in which no reader would be able entirely to disentangle fact from fantasy.
The story of Kenelm’s voyage of 1628 stands at the centre of his own story, reflecting and shaping not only his own personal history, but that of the nation. Until he left for the Mediterranean, Kenelm and those who were dearest to him had been harried, chastened and limited by the stories that others told about them – the rumour, gossip and sheer lies to which they fell victim. Above all, he risked being defined by ‘a stain in the blood’ – the legacy of a crime for which his father had been condemned to die, and whose bitter memory threatened to overshadow all of Kenelm’s ambitions and his promise. Kenelm embarked upon his journey to the Mediterranean in order to free himself from these burdens; but he travelled, above all, so that he could find the freedom to reinvent himself, the freedom to live out the greatest story that he would ever tell.
This book, like Kenelm’s own life, centres around his voyage of 1628. It begins with his own past – with the events, the hopes and the fears that shaped his early years, and that led him ultimately to take to the seas. By then following Kenelm into and around the Mediterranean, it becomes possible to witness the formation of his mind and his character: during his travels he drew upon his unique range of previous experiences, and fused them with the events and sensations from his travels into something entirely new. As he made his return voyage and re-entered English life following these adventures, Kenelm never ceased looking back on his voyage, striving to understand what he had experienced and who he had become, and to present his achievements to the world in the most compelling manner. Although his striving both for self-understanding and for success was a lifelong endeavour, this part of his story ends in 1633, with the death of Venetia. This dreadful event marked another decisive break in his life, dividing it into a before and an after; but the way in which he strove to come to terms with this personal tragedy, and the habits of mind and action that remained with him until the end of his life, show how fully he remained the man that he first became during his remarkable Mediterranean voyage.
Fryer Bacon reading one day of the many conquests of England, bethought himself how he might keep it hereafter from the like conquests, and so make himself famous hereafter to all posterities. This (after great study) he found could be no way so well done as one; which was to make a head of Brass, and if he could make this head to speak (and hear it when it speaks) then might he be able to wall all England about with Brass. To this purpose he got one Fryer Bungey to assist him, who was a great Scholler and a Magician, (but not to be compared to Fryer Bacon). These two with great study and pains so framed a head of Brass, that in the inward parts thereof there was all things like as is in a natural mans head.
Then called Fryer Bacon his man Miles, and told him, that it was not unknown to him what pains Fryer Bungy and himself had taken for three weeks space, only to make, and to hear the Brasen-head speak, which if they did not, then had they lost all their labour, and all England had a great loss thereby: therefore he entreated Miles that he would watch whilst that they sleep, and call them if the Head spake. Fear not, good Master (said Miles), I will not sleep, but harken and attend upon the head, and if it doe chance to speak, I will call you.
At last, after some noise the Head spake these two words, TIME IS. Miles hearing it to speak no more, thought his Master would be angry if he waked him for that, and therefore he let them both sleep.
After half an hour had passed, the Head did speak again, two words, which were these: TIME WAS. Miles respected these words as little as he did the former, and would not wake them, but still scoffed at the Brasen head, that it had learned no better words.
Then the Brazen-head spake again these words: TIME IS PAST. And therewith fell down, and presently followed a terrible noise, with strange flashes of fire, so that Miles was half dead with fear. At this noise the two Fryers awaked, and wondered to see the whole room so full of smoke, but that being vanished they might perceive the Brazen-head broken and lying on the ground: at this sight they grieved, and called Miles to know how this came. Miles half dead with fear, said that it fell down of it self, and that with the noise and fire that followed he was almost frighted out of his wits. Fryer Bacon asked him if he did not speake? Yes (quoth Miles) it spake, but to no purpose.
From The Famous Historie of Fryer Bacon . . . Very Pleasant and Delightfull to be Read (London, 1627).1
The very first time that ever they had sight of one another, [they] grew so fond of each other’s company, that all that saw them said assuredly that something above their tender capacity breathed this sweet affection into their hearts . . . It was the perfect friendship and noble love of two generous persons, that seemed to be born in this age by ordinance of heaven to teach the world anew what it hath long forgotten, the mystery of loving with honour and constancy, between a man and a woman; both of them with the vigour of their youth, and both blessed by nature with eminent endowments, as well of the mind as of the body.
‘Alas,’ said Stelliana, ‘be not so unjust as to tax him with what thou knowest he cannot remedy.’
‘Nay, but,’ said Faustina, interrupting her, ‘let not passion blind you altogether . . . Theagenes hath hardly escaped, by his mother’s extreme industry, with the scant relics of a shipwrecked estate, and from his father hath inherited nothing but a foul stain in his blood for attempting to make a revolution in this state.’
‘Methinks, Faustina,’ replied Stelliana, ‘you speak in his prejudice with more passion than you can accuse me of in loving him . . . for although it be the custom of these times to lay a punishment beyond death upon those that conspire against their prince or their government, that so by making it extend to their posterity, it may, peradventure, deter some . . . from attempting upon their own sacred persons and from making innovations in the laws; yet it seemeth to be with this condition, that if the son in himself deserve the contrary, he shall be esteemed and cherished according to his own merit, in which the father’s offence is then drowned; so that it rather becomes an incitation for him to do virtuous and worthy actions, than any stain or blemish.’1
ON THE NIGHT of 5 November 1627, aged twenty-four, Kenelm paced restlessly across his chambers in London as he strove to shut out the sounds of the outside world. He was ‘a goodly handsome person’, but now an expression of fear and indignation distorted his fine features, his slightly bulbous brow furrowing; his mouth, surrounded by a neat reddish beard, twisting as he muttered his frustrations to himself.2 He was hugely tall and heavily built, his long legs carrying him across the confined space of the room in just a few strides, his hands clenching and unclenching into great fists. For the past few months, Kenelm had devoted himself with single-minded focus to practical preparations for a voyage that he was determined to undertake. He had been negotiating a fair price for his ships, scouring the city for able seamen to crew them, and stockpiling barrels of gunpowder, water and salted beef. All the while he had worked energetically and adaptably to circumvent the obstacles that threatened to delay his departure, or to prevent it altogether. He had become increasingly convinced that these were not mere mishaps, but surreptitious attempts by the most powerful man in the land – the Duke of Buckingham, the King’s closest friend and advisor – to derail his carefully laid plans. But Kenelm was not deterred, and had convinced himself that he could prevail and set out as planned. He was determined to leave behind the memories and damaging rumours that he knew would haunt him for as long as he remained in England, and sail towards new and thrilling possibilities.
As the sun set on 5 November, however, and the city began to vibrate with flickering shapes and raucous noises, Kenelm realised that, for this night at least, there would be no escape from the darkest of the doubts that echoed in his mind. Throughout the course of the day, Londoners had stacked up great heaps of wood and refuse in any available open space; now, at nightfall, the inhabitants stood ringed around each of the piles while torches were thrown on and they ignited with a low roar like a great breath being let out across the city. As they did so, the bells of every church, from the smallest parish chapel to the tall tower of St Paul’s Cathedral, began to ring with a joyous jangle that cut through the winter streets. The crowds, tumbling from the taverns and holding cups of liquor aloft, screamed their approval, breaking into spontaneous songs and chants and cavorting through the midst of the city.
The festivities marked the anniversary of the Gunpowder Treason of 1605, the dark scheme from which King James I had been so miraculously delivered just two years into his reign, when a group of disillusioned Roman Catholics had tried and failed to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Every year throughout the two decades and more since the foiling of the plot, its memory had been drilled into the collective consciousness of the nation by a deluge of sermons and printed histories, until it was as established a cornerstone of the annual calendar as Christmas.3 In the months that Kenelm had fought to arrange his departure, he had steeled himself to endure once again the yearly ordeal in which his compatriots were repeatedly and gleefully exhorted: remember, remember the fifth of November. The nation seemed as one to offer to God ‘Thankfull remembrance of thy great and wonderfull deliverance’ from ‘our Enemies, the Papists’, and their ‘hellish powder’. ‘For which deliverance, upon the 5. of November, 1605., we sung praise, and expressed our joy, with Boonfiers and praises to thy holy name.4’ The memory of the event, scored ever deeper into the minds of men, women and children across the country who were urged to mark it ‘yearly and forever’, confirmed their status as a nation specially chosen and protected by God who had ‘snatcht us like Brands from the mouth of the Furnace’, and it bound them together as one.5
For Kenelm however, the night of 5 November brought not effusive celebration, but the flooding back of the darkest recollections of his childhood. He had been forced to endure the cackling and collective glee that erupted around him each year, for as long as he could recall; but in 1627, as he prepared for his voyage, the peals of bells and laughter and the smell of smoke drifting in through his tightly shuttered windows forced him back into himself with particular urgency, back to the very dangers and memories that made him so determined to leave England behind. He was desperate to set out for the Mediterranean, to begin the voyage that he had expended such effort in planning; but the festivities that thrummed so loudly in the background made him realise that he could not simply escape from the events that had inspired his journey. He would have to look back into his own past, more fully than he had previously forced himself to do, before he could embark upon the creation of a new present for himself.
The botched attempt to blow up Parliament in November 1605 had been followed by an equally ill-fated attempt over the ensuing days to incite rebellion in the Midlands, in which a forlorn gang of plotters ‘wandred a while through Warwickshire to Worcestershire, and from thence to the edge and borders of Staffordshire’, looking for sympathetic Catholic households and dragging a cart of weapons along with them.6 Among their number, towering over his fellow conspirators by more than a head, was a striking man in his late twenties named Sir Everard Digby.7 He had rushed from his family’s home at Gayhurst in Buckinghamshire to join the ragged procession, leaving behind his wife Mary, and his two infant sons – Kenelm, who was a little over two years old, and John, who had been born just a few months previously. The conspiracy quickly collapsed, and Everard was taken prisoner after trying to hide in the woods.8
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