The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened
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by Kenelm Digby
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Title: The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened
Author: Kenelm Digby
Editor: Anne MacDonell
Release Date: August 5, 2005 [EBook #16441]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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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gentleman, romantic Royalist, and somewhat out-of-date philosopher, I was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 £3000 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