Digby, SIR KENELM, was born at Gayhurst, near Newport Pagnell, 11th July 1603. His father, Sir Everard Digby (1578-1606), in 1592 came into a large estate, but seven years later turned Catholic, and was hanged for his part in the Gunpowder Plot (q.v.). Kenelm himself was bred a Catholic, but in 1618, after a half-year in Spain, entered Gloucester Hall, Oxford (now Worcester College). He left it in 1620 without a degree, and spent nearly three years abroad, in Florence chiefly. At Madrid he fell in with Prince Charles, and following him back to England, was knighted, and entered his service. In 1625, after a singular courtship, he secretly married 'that celebrated beautie and courtezane,' Venetia Stanley (1600-33), who had been his playmate in childhood. With two privateers he sailed in 1628 to the Mediterranean, and on 11th June vanquished a French and Venetian squadron off Scanderoon. On his beloved wife's death he withdrew to Gresham College, and there passed two hermit-like years, diverting himself with chemistry and the professors' good conversation. Meanwhile he had professed the Protestant faith, but, 'looking back,' in 1636 he announced his reconversion to Archbishop Laud; and his tortuous conduct during the Great Rebellion was dictated, it seems, by his zeal for Catholicism. He was imprisoned by the Parliament (1642-43), and had his estate confiscated; was at Rome (1645-47), where he finished by 'hectoring at his Holiness;' and thrice revisited England (1649-51-54), the third time staying two years, and entering into close relations with Cromwell. At the Restoration, however, he was well received, and retained his office of chancellor to Queen Henrietta Maria. He was one of the first members of the Royal Society (1663), and died 11th June 1665.
'The very Pliny of our age for lying,' said Stubbs of Digby, whom Evelyn terms 'an arrant mountebank.' Yet he was a friend of Descartes and Sir Thomas Browne (q.v.); he could appreciate the discoveries of Harvey, Bacon, and Galileo. In the Dictionary of National Biography (vol. xv. 1888) Mr S. L. Lee points out, that 'as a philosopher—an Aristotelian—Sir Kenelm undoubtedly owed much to Thomas White;' and he questions whether his much-vaunted 'powder of sympathy' was not really invented by Sir Gilbert Talbot. This powder—Digby professed to have learned the secret from a Carmelite who had travelled in the farthest East—was made of vitriol, and applied to a bandage, not to the wound itself. Anyhow, Digby's Discourse thereon (1658), like his Treatise of Bodies and of Man's Soul (1644), contains much that is curious, if little of real value; whilst in his Discourse concerning the Vegetation of Plants (1660), the chief of his other twelve works, he 'is said to have been the first to notice the importance of vital air or oxygen to plants.' See his bombastic Memoirs, dealing with his courtship (ed. Nicolas, 1827); his Scanderoon Voyage (Camden Society, 1868); and his Life 'by one of his descendants' (1896).