^^'i, ^ A 1/ 5 -yyUSl^^^ Digitized by tine Internet Archive in 2011 with funding from Boston Library Consortium IVIember Libraries http://www.archive.org/details/closetofsirkenelOOdigb THE CLOSET OF SIR KENELM DIGBY KNIGHT OPENED THE CLOSET OF SIR KENELM DIGBY KNIGHT OPENED; NEWLY EDITED, WITH INTRO- DUCTION, NOTES, AND GLOSSARY, BY ANNE MACDONELL LONDON: PHILIP LEE WARNER . 38 ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 19 10 -f" <^' <^ The deiign on the front binding of this volume reproduces a contempo- rary Binding (possibly by le Gascon ?) from the library of the Author, whose arms it embodies. * ^ullLGE LIBRARIES CiitSTNUT HiUu MA 02167 -^^x^Z'm'^ CONTENTS PAGE Introduction ...... ix The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Opened Title Page of the First Edition I To the Reader .... 3 Receipts for Mead, Metheglin, and other Drinks ...... 5 Cookery Receipts .... III 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. INTRODUCTIOUi^ known. Though the Dictionary ofNational Biogra- phy 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 ofthe kind, its own individual interest is not small; and I commend it with confidence to students of seventeenth-century domestic manners. To apolo- gise for it, to treat it as if it were some freak, some unowned sin ofDigby's,would be the greatest mis- take. On the contrary, its connection with his life and career is of the closest ; and 1 make bold to assert that of all his works, with the doubtful ex- ception 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, Crom- well, and all the great spirits of his time, the inti- mate 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 gor- geous 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 pre- INTRODUCTIO^Mj xi pared 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 m^WI be seen to fall into its due and important place. Kenelm Digby owed a good deal to circum- stances, 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 Ill's time, on the acquisition of some pro- perty 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 personand 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 foolish- est youth who ever blundered out of the ways of private virtue into conspiracy and crime. Kenelm, his elder son, born July 1 1, 1 603, was barely three years old when his father, the most guilelessand the most obstinate of the Gunpowder Plotters, died on the scaffold. The main part of the family wealth, — xii INTRODUCTIOD^ as the family mansion Gothurst—nowGayhurst in Buckinghamshire, came from Sir Everard'swife, 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 ex- terior over handsomely for his journey through the world. His childhoodwas 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; andeven 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 gentle- man ; 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 Buck- inghamshire family fell. It was aJohnDigby, after- wards 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 INTRODUCTION^ xiii Buckingham. But in 1617 Sir John was English ambassador in Madrid ; and it mayhavebeen 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 advance- ment, took him off to Spain when he was fourteen, and kept him there for ayear. Nor washis 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 re- garded them both impartially, or indifferently, with an occasional adherence to the one that for the mo- ment had the better exponent. His education was that of a dilettante. A year in Spain, in Court and diplomatic circles, was fol- lowed 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 penetra- tion 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 Fastor Fido, and his un- published 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 bio- graphies. 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 xiv INTRODUCTIOV^ burnt by the Parliamentarians, it seems not un- likely 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 lovewith his old playmate, now grown into great beauty, Venetia Anastasia Stanley, daughter of Ed- ward Stanley of Tonge, in Shropshire, and grand- daughterof the Earl of Northumberland. If Icould connect the beautiful Venetia with this cookery book, 1 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, W3.S " 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 tra- velled the more he admired. Into this tale of love and adventure I must break with the disturbing intelligence that the handsome — INTRODUCTION^ xv and romantic and spirited youth was in all proba- bility already procuring material for the compila- tion onPhysick and Chirurgery, which Hartman,his steward, published after his death.