He had died poor; and his surviving son John, with whom he had been on bad terms, declared that all the property that came to him was his father’s sumptuously compiled history of the Digby family.  Apparently John regained some part of the estates later, which perhaps had only been left away from him to pay off debts.  A great library of Sir Kenelm’s was still in Paris; and after his death it was claimed by the French king, and sold for 10,000 crowns.  His kinsman, the second Earl of Bristol, bought it, and joined it to his own; and the catalogue of the combined collection, sold in London in 1683, is an interesting and too little tapped source for Digby’s mental history.  Of his five children, three were already dead.  Kenelm, his eldest son, had fallen at St. Neot’s, in 1648, fighting for the King.  It was his remaining son John who sanctioned the publication of his father’s receipts.

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Sir Kenelm Digby has been recognised as the type of the great amateur, but always with a shaking of the head.  Why this scorn of accomplished amateurs?  Rather may their tribe increase, let us pray.  Our world languisheth now for lack of them.  He was fitted by nature to play the role superbly, to force his circumstances, never over pliant, to serve not his material interests, but his fame, his craving for universal knowledge and attainments.  Says Wood:  “His person was handsome and gigantick, and nothing was wanting to make him a compleat Cavalier.  He had so graceful elocution and noble address that had he been dropped out of the clouds into any part of the world, he would have made himself respected; but the Jesuits who cared not for him, spoke spitefully, and said it was true, but then he must not stay there above six weeks.  He had a great faculty, which proceeded from abundance of wit and invention, of proposing and reporting matters to the Virtuosi.”

Women adored him; and he took great pains to please them—­though in spite of the importunities of Marie de Medicis, the long friendship with Henrietta Maria, his early flirtation with the lovely Spaniard, his earnest and impolitic championship of the notorious Lady Purbeck—­Romish convert and adventuress—­Venetia, it seems, remained his only love.  He was never the mere gallant.  He treated women as his intellectual equals, but as equals who had to be splendidly entertained and amused.  His conversation was “ingeniose and innocent.”  Lloyd speaks of “the grace wherewith he could relate magnarum rerum minutias, the little circumstances of great matters.”  But men were at his feet as well; and on his tour among Italian courts, one of the grandees said that, “having no children, he was very willing his wife should bring him a Prince by Sir Kenelme, whom he imagined the just measure of perfection.”