Venetia Stanley

In order to remove himself from this situation, when fighting broke out in Angers, he let it be understood that he had died, and shortly after he joined the English monarchy’s diplomatic mission to Spain.

[4] Yet John Aubrey’s view of her is the one that has prevailed, such as his report that Digby was supposed to have replied to concerns over Venetia's virtue with the comment that "A handsome lusty man that was discreet might make a virtuous wife out of a brothel-house."

[6] The poem opens with Edward addressing the married Venetia: "First, last and always dearest, closest, best,/Source of my travail and my rest,/The letter which I shall not send, I write/To cheer my more than arctic night".

In another of Digby’s absences on diplomatic missions, in October 1625, Venetia gave birth to their first child, Kenelm, still in secret, with a single servant to attend her.

She founded her charity work through a gambling habit, with unusually good luck at the card table and a scheme to save up her profits.

She had, he said, been suffering occasional headaches through the previous eight years, for which she took "viper-wine" (which could have been one of several concoctions involving vipers or their venom in wine, but which is unlikely to have been toxic).

Although he had not been faithful while his wife was alive[13] and he carried out a long relationship with another woman after her death, he never remarried,[14] and the event separated the two great phases of his life: one in which he was a bright young courtier jockeying for position, and one in which he was a melancholy scientist and Catholic apologist.

He commissioned plaster casts made of her head, hands, and feet, and had Van Dyck, a good friend, paint Venetia on her deathbed before she was buried at Christchurch, Newgate, in London, in an elaborate tomb of marble topped with a portrait bust.

There he initially spent his time writing letters eulogizing his wife, which, collected together with verses by Ben Jonson and other poets patronized by Digby, eventually formed a volume titled In Praise of Venetia.

The cut scenes, mostly sexual in nature, were first privately circulated in a pamphlet, and eventually included as an appendix to a later printing within a year or two of the first publication.

The book ends with Theagenes on a maritime expedition (modelled after Digby's own exploits), looking forward to his return home to his wife and sons.

Vittorio Gabrieli, an Italian scholar, published English-language editions of both In Praise of Venetia and The Private Memoirs in Rome in the second half of the 20th century.