The closet of Sir Kenelm Digby, knight, opened / newly edited with introduction, notes, and glossary, by Anne Macdonell.

  • Digby, Kenelm, 1603-1665.
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The closet of Sir Kenelm Digby, knight, opened / newly edited with introduction, notes, and glossary, by Anne Macdonell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    as the family mansion Gothurst—nowGayhurst— in Buckinghamshire, came from Sir Everard’swife, 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 £^ooo a year ; but even its value in those days did not furnish a youth of such varied ambitions and such magnificent ex- terior over handsomely for his journey through the world. His childhoodwas 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; andeven 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 destinyof other young men of his class, unless he had been content to be a simple country gentle- man ; 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 Buck- inghamshire family fell. It was aJohnDigby, after- wards 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