Forgotten hero

A Stain in the Blood: The Remarkable Voyage of Sir Kenelm Digby. By Joe Moshenska. William Heinemann; 553 pages; £20.

WHATEVER became of Sir Kenelm Digby? A cook, alchemist and philosopher and the inventor of the modern wine bottle, his life seems to have sunk without a trace. His recipes, set out in “The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Kt. Opened”, were published and republished. His life was first told by John Aubrey, the great biographer of Digby’s age, but only one biography has appeared since the 1950s, written by a distant descendant of Digby’s.

He was the son of Everard Digby, a Gunpowder Plotter condemned to death for conspiring to blow up King James I. Yet Kenelm charmed his way into becoming a courtier to James’s son Charles I. He had a bookish, sheltered upbringing. Despite that, he went on to marry Venetia Stanley, a famous 17th-century beauty painted by Van Dyck and elegised by Ben Jonson. Such was his fame for the occult that it was later rumoured that he had murdered her with wine laced with viper venom. In a bid to remove the “stain in his blood” as the son of a Gunpowder Plotter, he decided to reinvent himself as a pirate. It is an extraordinary story.

Joe Moshenska, a specialist in the Renaissance period at Cambridge University, digs up the first half of that life story, focusing on the voyage to reclaim his honour. Charles I commissioned Digby to be a privateer, free to sink enemy ships or seize their loot. Charles was keen for extra cash raised through non-parliamentary means, like his predecessors. Digby acted as ship-sinker, but partly as diplomat as well. He returned with looted wool bales, wine crates, currants (highly sought-after commodities at the time), ancient Greek marbles and Arabic manuscripts. In Algiers he persuaded the city governors to free 50 English slaves and open the port to all English vessels.

The romance between Digby and Stanley is just as fascinating. It was said that he faked his death in order to escape the affections of the Queen Regent of France. When Stanley heard he had died, she collapsed in grief and was persuaded to get engaged to a devious suitor. She later forgave Digby, and married him.

Mr Moshenska’s biography gives a wider picture of England’s place in the world. It is not hard to see Digby as an early product of the idea of empire. He brought back treasure but he also brought back ancient learning, as well as foreign fauna and flora. That an intellectual would become an ocean-faring buccaneer may seem incongruous, but it would lay the foundations of an English imperialism. Colonialists would go hand-in-hand with botanists and astronomers in their conquest of the globe.

The book also connects the English national story with a European one. Digby returned from his travels with continental recipes, philosophy and science. Around the same time Inigo Jones returned with ideas for classical architecture. Charles I, inspired partly by the opulence of the Spanish Habsburg court where he first met Digby, had Van Dyck and Rubens paint his and his father’s image.

Mr Moshenska depicts an age that sits between superstition and a scientific revolution. Digby indulged in horoscopes and alchemy, and discussed Galileo’s new ideas with Florentine academics. He advanced a theory that wounds would heal if a powder was applied to the weapon that caused the injury. (Unsurprisingly it worked better than spreading mustard on the open wound, a common alternative.) His book on the weapon-salve, though much mocked, went through 29 English editions. Digby went on to write the first paper which the new Royal Society formally asked to publish, and he came up with a crude theory of photosynthesis.

In his short biography Mr Moshenska successfully brings back to life a forgotten self-made man who was at the same time braggadocio and philosopher, and who seemed to live so many lives. Readers curious to learn more can only await the second half of the story.