Kenelm Digby

For his versatility, he is described in John Pointer's Oxoniensis Academia (1749) as the "Magazine of all Arts and Sciences, or (as one stiles him) the Ornament of this Nation".

Kenelm was sufficiently in favour with James I to be proposed as a member of Edmund Bolton's projected Royal Academy (with George Chapman, Michael Drayton, Ben Jonson, John Selden and Sir Henry Wotton).

[dubious – discuss][2][3] He went to Gloucester Hall, Oxford, in 1618, where he was taught by Thomas Allen, but left without taking a degree.

[4] Sailing his flagship, the Eagle (later renamed Arabella),[8] he arrived off Gibraltar on 18 January and captured several Spanish and Flemish vessels.

[9] He seized a Dutch vessel near Majorca, and after other adventures gained a victory over the French and Venetian ships in the harbour of Iskanderun on 11 June.

His wife Venetia, a noted beauty, died suddenly in 1633, prompting a famous deathbed portrait by Van Dyck and a eulogy by Ben Jonson.

Jonson's poem about Venetia is now partially lost, because of the loss of the centre sheet of a leaf of papers which held the only copy.)

Digby, stricken with grief and the object of enough suspicion for the Crown to order an autopsy (rare at the time) on Venetia's body, secluded himself in Gresham College and attempted to forget his personal woes through scientific experimentation and a return to Catholicism.

Digby, alongside Hungarian chemist Johannes Banfi Hunyades, constructed a laboratory under the lodgings of Gresham Professor of Divinity where the two conducted botanical experiments.

She may have been the daughter of Edward Sackville, 4th Earl of Dorset and Venetia Stanley prior to her marriage to Sir Kenelm.

[12] Returning to support Charles I in his struggle to establish episcopacy in Scotland (the Bishops' Wars), he found himself increasingly unpopular with the growing Puritan party.

Following an incident in which he killed a French nobleman, Mont le Ros, in a duel,[14] he returned to England via Flanders in 1642, and was jailed by the House of Commons.

Following the establishment of the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell, who believed in freedom of conscience,[citation needed] Digby was received by the government as a sort of unofficial representative of English Roman Catholics, and was sent in 1655 on a mission to the Papacy to try to reach an understanding.

At the Restoration, Digby found himself in favour with the new regime due to his ties with Henrietta Maria, the Queen Mother.

This was a kind of sympathetic magic; one manufactured a powder using appropriate astrological techniques, and daubed it, not on the injured part, but on whatever had caused the injury.

During the 1630s, Digby owned a glassworks at Newnham-on-Severn[25] and manufactured glass onions, 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 translucent green or brown color protected the contents from light.