Exile in Paris provided fresh opportunity for scientific study, though his connection with the English Catholic malcontents, and his services to the Queen Henrietta Maria, who now made him her Chancellor, absorbed much of his time.  When the Cause needed him, the Cavalier broke away from philosophy; and in 1645 he set out for Rome, at the bidding of the Queen, to beg money for her schemes.  With all his address, diplomacy was not among the chief of his talents.  With high personages he took a high tone.  Innocent X gave 10,000 crowns to the Cause; but they quarrelled; and the Pope went so far as to accuse Digby of misappropriation of the money.  Digby, a man of clean hands, seems to have taken up the Queen’s quarrel.  She would have nothing to do with Rinuccini’s Irish expedition, which his Holiness was supporting; and her Chancellor naturally insisted on disbursing the funds at her commands rather than at the Pope’s.  Moreover, he was now renewing his friendship with Thomas White, a heretic Catholic priest, of several aliases, some of whose work had been placed on the Index.  White was a philosophic thinker of considerable power and subtlety, and he and Digby acted and reacted on each other strongly—­though Digby’s debt is perhaps the greater.  Their respective parts in the Two Treatises and in the Institutionum Peripateticorum libri quinque, published under White’s name, but for which Sir Kenelm is given the main credit, can hardly now be sifted.  White, at all events, was not a prudent friend for an envoy to the Holy See.  Digby “grew high and hectored with his holinesse, and gave him the lye.  The pope said he was mad.”  Thus Aubrey.  Henrietta Maria sent him once more on the same errand; but the Roman Curia continued to look on him as a “useless and restless man, with scanty wisdom.”  Before returning, however, he paid a round of visits to Italian courts, making everywhere a profound impression by his handsome person and his liveliness.  He had to hasten back to England on his own business.  His fortunes were desperate; and he desired to compound for his estates.

A week or so after the King’s death he is proved by his correspondence to be in France, having fled after one more pronouncement of him as a dangerous man.  He went into exile this time with a sad heart; and it was not only the loyalist in him that cried out.  The life of an English country gentleman would never have satisfied him; yet he longed for it now it had become impossible.  He writes from Calais to a friend:  “Those innocent recreations you mention of tabors and pipes, and dancing ladies, and convenient country houses, shady walks and close arbours, make one sigh to be again a spectator of them, and to be again in little England, where time slides more gently away than in any part of the world. Quando sia mai ch’a rividerti io torno?”