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Romancing the salve: Sir Kenelm Digby and the powder of sympathy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 September 2007

ELIZABETH HEDRICK
ELIZABETH HEDRICK
Affiliation:
1 University Station B5000, University of Texas, Austin 78712, USA. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

Sir Kenelm Digby's A Late Discourse … Touching the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathy (1658) is usually read in the context of seventeenth-century explanations of the weapon-salve. The salve supposedly worked by being applied to the weapon that made a wound rather than to the wound itself. But Digby's essay was as much an effort to claim priority for a powdered version of the sympathetic cure as an explanation of how the cure worked. A close examination of Digby's claims in the Late Discourse in the context of his own earlier work and of works by his contemporaries shows his priority claim to have been false. It was recognized as such by his most knowledgeable associates. The story of Digby's fabrications offers a case study of the generic and rhetorical terms in which seventeenth-century English thinkers made and challenged natural-philosophical claims.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , June 2008 , pp. 161 - 185
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 British Society for the History of Science

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References

1 Pagel discusses Van Helmont's interest in the weapon-salve in Joan Baptista Van Helmont, Cambridge, 1982, 9–13. Debus has discussed the weapon-salve often in the context of his studies of early modern chemistry and the work of Robert Fludd. See especially Debus, Allen G., ‘Robert Fludd and the use of Gilbert's De Magnete in the weapon-salve controversy’, Journal of the History of Medicine (1964), 19, 389–417Google ScholarPubMed; idem, The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2 vols., New York, 1977, i, 205–93; and idem, The English Paracelsians, New York, 1966, 121–3.

2 As Debus and others have observed, the salve or powder did appear to work, no doubt because its use involved keeping wounds clean and free of the kinds of medicines that would have conventionally been applied to them, and which could have caused infection rather than promoted healing. The apparent efficacy of sympathetic cures demanded explanation. In recent years, two scholars have discussed Joan Baptista van Helmont's theological disputes with the Jesuits in the 1620s and 1630s, which focused largely on his attempts to justify the operation of the salve as non-magical. See Caminietzki, C. Z., ‘Jesuits and alchemy in the early seventeenth century: Father Johannes Roberti and the weapon-salve controversy’, Ambix (2001), 48, 83–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Waddell, M. A., ‘The perversion of nature: Johannes Baptista Van Helmont, the Society of Jesus, and the magnetic cure of wounds’, Canadian Journal of History (2003), 38, 180–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See Dobbs, B. J., ‘Studies in the natural philosophy of Sir Kenelm Digby’, Ambix (1971), 18, 1–25, 6CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. In its sympathy for the perspective of seventeenth-century thinkers, the approach taken by Dobbs marks a notable advance upon that of Digby's biographers, who are commonly eager to apologize for the fact that Digby believed in sympathetic cures at all. See, for example, R. T. Petersson, Sir Kenelm Digby, The Ornament of England 1603–1665, Cambridge, MA, 1956, 265–74; also R. D. Thomas, Digby: The Gunpowder Plotter's Legacy, London, 2001, 233–9. The more complete citation for Digby's discourse on the powder is A Late Discourse Made in a Solemne Assembly of Nobles and Learned Men at Montpellier in France … Touching the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathy, London, 1658. I will refer to this work in the text as the Late Discourse.

4 Dobbs, op. cit. (3), 13.

5 Recipes for the salve varied. A recipe in the possession of John Locke's father is characteristic, although it excludes mummy; it does include skull moss as well as dried earthworms. See BM Add. MS 28273 f.141. Digby's powder differs from the Countess of Kent's powder, Gascon's powder and similar aristocratic home remedies in its simplicity (it only contained one ingredient) and in the fact that it worked at a distance. The Countess of Kent's powder, for example, contained numerous rare or expensive ingredients, including pearls, crabs' eyes, amber, bezar, saffron, ambergris and musk, and it was taken internally, in sack or hartshorn jelly. See E. Grey, Countess of Kent, A Choice Manual of Rare and Select Secrets in Physick and Chyryrgery, London, 1653, 175–6.

6 K. G. Huston, introduction to Sir William Osler, Sir Kenelm Digby's Powder of Sympathy: An Unfinished Essay by Sir William Osler, Los Angeles, 1972, p. xiv.

7 Digby, op. cit. (3), for full title.

8 Digby, op. cit. (3), 17.

9 Digby, op. cit. (3), 151.

10 Digby, op. cit. (3), 5–6.

11 Digby, op. cit. (3), 9–10.

12 Digby, op. cit. (3), 10.

13 Digby, op. cit. (3), 5.

14 Shapin, S., ‘Pump and circumstance: Robert Boyle's literary technology’, Social Studies of Science (1984), 14, 481–520CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Shapin elaborates further on the various conditions necessary to make a piece of testimony credible for natural-philosophical purposes in A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England, Chicago, 1994, 212–27.

15 Digby, op. cit. (3), 11–12.

16 Some students of both Digby and Howell have implied that the cure was effected in Europe rather than in England. See J. F. Fulton, Sir Kenelm Digby, Writer, Bibliophile and Protagonist of William Harvey, New York, 1937, 33. See also the entry on James Howell by D. R. Woolf in the new DNB. As William Osler noted long ago, however, such a supposition ignores the importance of the physical presence of King James as a valorizing force in Digby's story. Sir William Osler, Sir Kenelm Digby's Powder of Sympathy: An Unfinished Essay by Sir William Osler, Los Angeles, 1972, 10.

17 Digby does appear to have been the first English writer to refer to the powder in print, in his 1644 work Two Treatises, Paris, 1644, rpt. 1970, 164. Digby's discussion of the sympathetic cure in this work will be discussed below. Three works from the early 1650s that also discuss the powder are Walter Charleton's introduction to A Ternary of Paradoxes, London, 1650; a section at the end of Nathaniel Highmore's The History of Generation, London, 1651; and a brief chapter in Charleton's Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana, London, 1654, rpt. New York, 1966. These works will also be discussed below.

18 Digby, op. cit. (3), 5.

19 See Sir F. Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, in The Works of Francis Bacon Volume 4 (ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath), Boston, 1864, 161–2. In this discussion Bacon refers to the weapon-salve as an ‘ointment’ and mentions skull moss, bear fat, boar's fat, and similar compounds in its ingredients.

20 James was born in 1566 and would have been 58 in 1624.

21 See, for example, Jackson, W. A., ‘Sympathetic ointment and the power of sympathy’, Pharmacy History Australia (2002), 18, 10–13Google Scholar, especially 11–12, in which James Howell is referred to as ‘Thomas Howell’. See also Fulton, op. cit. (16), 33, and the section on Digby in L. Thorndike's History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols., New York, 1923–58, vii, 503. Thorndike's only gesture toward scepticism is use of the phrase ‘Digby claimed to have learned [of the powder]’, at the start of a long paragraph that otherwise offers the stories of both the monk and of Howell's cure without flinching. Most importantly, see Foster, M., ‘Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–65) as man of religion and thinker – I, intellectual formation’, Downside Review (1988), 106, 35–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 37; Foster, M., ‘Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–65) as man of religion and thinker – II’, Downside Review (1988), 106, 101–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 115–16. Foster repeats both tales without significant hesitation in these essays, as well as in his account of Digby for the new DNB. The story of Howell's cure is also presented as fact in Woolf's DNB essay on Howell and in D. R. Woolf, ‘Conscience, constancy, and ambition in the career and writings of James Howell’, in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England (ed. J. Morrill, P. Slack and D. Woolf), Oxford, 1993, 243–78, 245.

22 Foster, op. cit. (21), recounts the story about Howell out of chronological sequence, when he discusses the sympathetic powder in his second essay. But he relates the story of the monk when he discusses events in Digby's life from the early 1620s. T. Longueville, in The Life of Sir Kenelm Digby by One of His Descendents, London, 1896, 49, 123–4, discusses the encounter with the Carmelite friar as part of Digby's experience while on the grand tour, then apologizes for telling the Howell story out of order in a subsequent chapter. Thomas, op. cit. (3), 47, 234, takes a similar approach. Even Petersson, in the most scholarly and extensive biography to date, tells of Digby's supposed meeting with the monk while describing his European adventures, then recounts the story of Howell's cure in a later chapter specifically on the Late Discourse. See Petersson, op. cit. (3), 54, 265–74.

23 Waddell, op. cit. (2), 182; Dobbs, op. cit. (3), 9, 7.

24 Sir Kenelm Digby, Loose Fantasies (ed. Vittorio Gabrieli), Rome, 1968, 190 n. 65. In the Ethopian Story Calasiris tells the Greek Cnemon of his search for knowledge and says, ‘My life now is a wandering one, but was not such aforetime, for in the past I was a prophet.’ Heliodorus, Ethiopian Story (tr. W. Lamb), London, 1961, 54. Calasiris also provides Cnemon with crucial information about other characters in the tale. Theagenes is a central character in Heliodorus, and Theagenes is also the name that Digby gives to the character who more or less represents him in Loose Fantasies.

25 On the first page of his introduction to Loose Fantasies Gabrieli classifies Digby's work as an ‘autobiographical romance’ rather than an autobiography, taking it out of the category of history and placing it in the category of fiction. He registers this shift by rejecting the title given to Digby's work in its first published edition (Private Memoirs of Sir Kenelm Digby) in favour of the term Digby himself used in reference to it (Loose Fantasies). Gabrieli cautions against uncritically taking material in the Loose Fantasies as biographical fact and devotes his edition, in a sense, to placing Digby's work in its literary and even specifically fictive contexts. Gabrieli's scepticism does not extend to the Late Discourse. He suggests that the Brachman of the Loose Fantasies, whom he accepts as a complete fiction, may have been inspired ‘by the Carmelite friar from India and Persia whom [Digby] recalled meeting at the court of the duke of Tuscany’. Gabrieli, in Digby, op. cit. (24), 190 n. 65.

26 Anon., Eliana (1661), A3v; quoted in P. Salzman, English Prose Fiction 1558–1700: A Critical History, Oxford, 1985, 112. For a discussion of the pliancy and fungibility of the romance mode in the seventeenth century see Salzman, 110–22; and for a discussion of related issues in a more international context see M. Doody, The True Story of the Novel, New Brunswick, NJ, 1996, 251–73.

27 First published in German as Chymische Hochzeit, supposedly by Christian Rosencreutz. This Rosicrucian publication was probably written by J. V. Andreae in 1605. For a modern English translation see J. Godwin (tr.), The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, Grand Rapids, 1991. For a systematic study of Andreae's life and work see J. Warwick Montgomery, Cross and Crucible: Johann Valentin Andreae (1586–1654) Phoenix of the Theologians, 2 vols., The Hague, 1973.

28 The phrase ‘real-life romance’ was Boyle's. For a useful discussion of Boyle's attraction to and use of the romance in various of his works see Principe, L., ‘Virtuous romance and the romantic virtuoso: the shaping of Robert Boyle's literary style’, Journal of the History of Ideas (1995), 56, 377–97, 382CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Elements of the romance appear to have been deeply embedded in, even interconnected with, the whole genre of alchemical writing that William R. Newman has called the ‘transmutation history’. For example, the ‘wandering adept’, a character very similar to Digby's Calasiris figures, was a central and recurring personage in such histories. See William R. Newman, Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge, MA, 1994, 3–13 and passim.

29 Both Newman (op. cit. (28)) and Lawrence M. Principe have argued that the ‘virtual witnessing’ discussed by Shapin and others appears in alchemical transmutation histories as well as in the kinds of experimental reports produced by members of the Royal Society. To the extent that this is the case, Digby's use of both a wandering monk and noble witnesses as authorizing tropes in the Late Discourse is fully in line with the conventions found in transmutation histories. See L. M. Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest, Princeton, NJ, 1998, 93–8, 106–11.

30 Digby, op. cit. (17), 164. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word ‘salve’ also denoted the more generalized notion of ‘cure’ as early as the thirteenth century. But the oldest meaning of the word specifically denotes an unctuous preparation. Given the nature of the recipes for the weapon-salve available before 1644, it is most likely that ‘salve’ as Digby uses it in the Two Treatises refers not to a general cure but to an oily compound rather than a powder.

31 Thomas, op. cit. (3), 236.

32 Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd Series, X, 18. Cited in Petersson, op. cit. (3), 347 n. 70.

33 Charleton, op. cit. (17), C3. Charleton reports that Digby told him the story ‘immediately before his late exile’, which would have been in 1649.

34 Of the date when the powder was supposedly introduced by Digby, Petersson himself, op. cit. (3), appears confused. He says on 266 that the time when Howell was cured ‘was some twenty-five years before the time of the lecture [in 1657, i.e. 1632]’. But on 347 n. 70 he says the approximate date of the cure is arrived at through the remark to Winthrop, i.e. 1621. The fact that Digby himself gives differing dates for the cure of Howell may explain in part why even the most prominent of Digby's biographers is unclear as to the timetable of Digby's supposed acquisition and use of the cure.

35 J. Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianae: The Familiar Letters of James Howell, London, 1892, 419–20. The dating of Howell's letters is not always full or reliable. Some letters were written only after Howell entered Fleet Prison, even though they refer to events that occurred earlier. Some are dated only by day and month. This letter is given the full date of ‘15 Jan. 1635’, which may mean that it was authentically written in 1635. In any case, most of the letters that are misleadingly dated were likely to have been composed after the periods to which they refer. So if this letter is from after 1635, it means that Howell's attachment to the ‘salve’ rather than the ‘powder’ as his preferred notion of the sympathetic cure lasted even longer than I suggest. For information on the dating of Howell's letters see Hirst, V. M., ‘The Authenticity of James Howell's Familiar Letters’, Modern Language Review (1959), 54, 558–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 In a similar vein, it is worth noting that Howell referred in a work written in 1656 to the ‘unguentum Armarium that cures a far off’, and not to the ‘sympathetic powder’, perhaps suggesting that his view of the cure as a salve rather than a powder endured even until the publication of Digby's Late Discourse in 1658. See J. Howell, Some Sober Inspections Made into the Carriage and Consults of the Late Long-Parliament, London, 1656, 174–5.

37 Charleton, introduction to A Ternary of Paradoxes, op. cit. (17), C3v–C4r.

38 See T. Fairfax, Baron Fairfax's report of the battle and the capture in Generall Fairfax's letter to the Honorable William Lenthall Esquire, Speaker of the Honorable House of Commons. Concerning the storming and taking of Tiverton Castle and Church. Together with a perfect list of the commanders and souldiers that were taken prisoners, London, 1645. Talbot's name appears at the head of the list of the prisoners taken. There is no entry in the DNB for Talbot, although he was a person of note. After the Restoration he served as Master of the Jewel Office and as Ambassador to Sweden for Charles II. Fulton, op. cit. (16), 35, wrongly identifies the Sir Gilbert Talbot associated with the powder with the Sir Gilbert Talbot who was ‘the courtier of Henry VII’.

39 For a brief account of Charleton's activities during the Civil War see Sharp, L., ‘Walter Charleton's early life 1620–1659, and relationship to natural philosophy in mid-seventeenth-century England’, Annals of Science (1973), 30, 311–40CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Sharp's speculations about Charleton's duties as Charles I's physician appear on 315 n. 15.

40 Highmore, title page. The body of the work makes no issue of the intellectual provenance of the powder. It is devoted instead to offering a fundamentally mechanical explanation for the powder's operation, delineating ten (misnumbered in the text as nine) principles that, taken together, supposedly explain its operation. Highmore does, however, refer to the story of Howell's cure by Digby, and in a manner that suggests he might have borrowed it from Charleton: see Highmore, op. cit. (17), 134.

41 For information regarding Talbot's membership in the Royal Society see M. Hunter, The Royal Society and its Fellows 1660–1700, Oxford, 1994, BSHS Monographs, No. 4. The inclusion of Talbot's name on two of the evaluative lists of members in Appendix 8 suggests that he was a valued member of the society, although this may have been as much for his social status and ability to pay dues as for his enthusiasm for and knowledge of natural-philosophical issues.

42 T. Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London, 4 vols., London, 1756–7, i, 24–5.

43 Birch, op. cit. (42), i, 31.

44 For example, Digby claimed to have written his response to Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici in just twenty-four hours. See Petersson, op. cit. (3), 169, for a demolition of Digby's claim, although Petersson also seems inclined to excuse Digby for his mendacity on this point. Newman, op. cit. (28), 62, has noted that Digby told of having been visited by Eirenaeus Philalethes while imprisoned in the 1640s, yet this claim was clearly ‘impossible’ precisely because Eirenaeus Philalethes was himself a fabrication, the fictive if (for a time) widely celebrated alter-ego of George Starkey.

45 See Shapin's description of this ideal in A Social History of Truth, op. cit. (14) 120–1. Shapin cites Frank Whigham's useful discussion of sprezzatura in Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory, Berkeley, 1984, 93–5, in which Whigham also notes that sprezzatura could include an easy indifference to one's own mistakes, a point that is relevant to my discussion of Digby.

46 Fulton, op. cit. (16), 35, notes that Denis Papin had published a series of tracts on the powder of sympathy in France between 1650 and 1652, and the existence of these, too, would have encouraged Digby to write the Late Discourse earlier than 1658, if merely establishing his priority in the face of growing intellectual claims to it in the early 1650s were his only motive for publication.

47 See Petersson, op. cit. (3), 223–6 and 251–8. In ‘Atomism and eschatology: Catholicism and natural philosophy in the interregnum’, BJHS (1982), 15, 211–39, John Henry argues that Digby's natural philosophy, especially in the Two Treatises, had been devised specifically to provide the basis of a ‘true faith’ that would allow for the religious comprehension of Catholics and English Protestants. Neil Kamil has also emphasized the ways in which Digby's natural-philosophical speculations forwarded his various political aims in Fortress of the Soul: Violence, Metaphysics, and Material Life in the Huguenots' New World, 1517–1751, Baltimore, 2005, 492–7.

48 Digby, op. cit. (3), 68.

49 Digby, op. cit. (3), 104–5.

50 Digby, op. cit. (3), 28. For the context of Digby's privateering venture see Petersson, op. cit. (3), 74–82.

51 Digby, op. cit. (3). The term ‘cavalier’ had begun to apply specifically to adherents of Charles I as early as 1642, according to the OED.

52 Digby, op. cit. (17), 78.

53 Digby, op. cit. (3), 101.

54 This of course leaves open the question of what state of political affairs caused Digby to include these anecdotes in his essay on the powder: what he knew, when he knew it and at what point in the composition of his published essay the anecdotes were introduced. The matter invites further study.

55 Sharp, op. cit. (39), notes that it is possible that Charleton's exposure to French influences, including Gassendian atomism and Cartesianism, may have led him to alter his view of the constitution of matter between 1650 and 1654, although John Henry has argued that this shift was not as abrupt as Nina Gelbart, for one, has claimed. See Henry, John, ‘Occult qualities and the experimental philosophy: active principles in pre-Newtonian matter theory’, History of Science (1986), 24, 335–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 370–1 n. 19; Gelbart, N. R., ‘The intellectual development of Walter Charleton’, Ambix (1971), 18, 149–68CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

56 Charleton, Physiologia, op. cit. (17), 380–2. Charleton's empirical bent here reflects the contemporary emphasis placed on experiments by Boyle and others, but, as Martha Baldwin's discussion of the numerous trials made on snakestones suggests, sometimes experiments alone were inadequate to persuade a community of interested observers of the truth or falsehood of a putative phenomenon in the early modern period. Personal testimony was, and remained, extremely important. See Baldwin, Martha, ‘The snakestone experiments: an early modern medical debate’, Isis (1995), 86, 394–418CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

57 Charleton, Physiologia, op. cit. (17), 380–1.

58 Shapin, A Social History of Truth, op. cit. (14), 107–19.

59 Charleton, Physiologia, op. cit. (17), 382.

60 Individuals incarcerated in Fleet Prison could have visitors. For a fee they could also reside in an area near the prison called the Liberties, or, to the extent that the practice at Newgate also applied to the Fleet, they might even be granted temporary freedom, either with or without an accompanying gaoler. See T. P. Connor, ‘Malignant reading: John Squier's Newgate Prison Library, 1642–46’, in The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society (2006), 154–84, 161. If Howell lived in the Liberties, he may have had easy access to news and visitors on occasion. But he seems unlikely to have been able to afford such privileges. (Woolf's DNB essay on Howell suggests that Howell's incarceration was for debt rather than for political sedition.) Howell's time in the Fleet probably reduced his social intercourse significantly.

61 [Sir Kenelm Digby], A Choice Collection of rare Secrets and Experiments in Philosophy, as also Rare and unheard-of Medicines, Menstruums, and Alkahests; with the True Secret of Volatilizing the fixt Salt of Tartar. Collected and Experimented by the Honourable and truly Learned Sir Kenelm Digby, Kt. Chancellour to Her majesty the Queen-Mother. Hitherto kept Secret since his Decease, but now Published for the good and benefit of the Publick, by George Hartman, London, 1682, 270–2.

62 English Post, March 1702, 27–30, as quoted in Thomas, op. cit. (3), 235.

63 J. Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing, London, 1661, 207.

64 T. Sprat, History of the Royal Society, London, 1667, 165.

65 Sprat was admitted in 1663 and Glanvill the following year. See Hunter, op. cit. (41), 168, 160. Hunter's comprehensive catalogue lists the dates in which all members were admitted. Digby was one of the original members, admitted in 1660, and both Talbot and Charleton were admitted in 1661, not long before the discussions of the powder of sympathy. Howell appears never to have been a Fellow, perhaps because his finances would not allow it.

66 R. Midgley, A New Treatise of Naturall Philosophy, London, 1678, 26, 33, 35.

67 J. Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, London, 1677, 17, similarly 62 and 267; G. Harvey, A Treatise of the Small-Pox and Measles, London, 1696, 39; H. M. Herwig, The Art of Curing Sympathetically, or Magnetically, London, 1700, 37.

68 E. Stillingfleet, Irenicum. A weapon-salve for the Churches wounds, London, 1660. Stillingfleet only reverts to his metaphor once after using it in his title (see 4). But his readers clearly found the image in his title striking.

69 As William Bynum has shown, both the salve and the powder enjoyed a certain celebrity in poems and plays after the Restoration. See Bynum, William, ‘The weapon salve in seventeenth-century English drama’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (1966), 21, 8–23CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. But the metaphoric use of the salve in theological discourse after 1660 is notable and sustained, and it has everything to do with the ‘weapon’ aspect of the weapon-salve.

70 J. Brown, An Apologeticall Relation of the Particular Sufferings of the Faithfull Ministers & Professours of the Church of Scotland, Since August, 1660, Edinburgh(?), 1665, 249–51.

71 V. Alsop, Melius inquirendum, 1678, A2.

72 See, for example, Petersson, op. cit. (3), 273: ‘Though Digby's treatise ran through ten editions before Howell died, he is not known to have denounced it.’

73 J. Howell, Therologia, the Parly of Beasts, London, 1660, 103.

74 For another reference to Digby see Howell, op. cit. (73), 148. Here he is referred to by initials, but the ‘Etymological derivation’ that follows the Key at the beginning of the romance identifies the initials immediately as Digby's.

75 Howell, op. cit. (73), 107.

76 In Doctor Fludds Answer unto M. Foster or, The Squeesing of Parson Fosters Sponge, ordained by him for the wiping away of the Weapon-Salve, London, 1631, 108, Robert Fludd tells of a cure effected with the weapon-salve by a ‘Captaine Stiles’. But it is highly unlikely that Stiles is Howell's captain in Therologia. Stiles's cure involves a salve rather than a powder, and Stiles's military title is irrelevant to the story Fludd tells about him. Stiles cures a rural labourer, who has fallen on a scythe, by anointing the scythe, which has been sent to him in London. A messenger later comes from the country to report that the cure worked and to thank Stiles, who is at dinner with friends. (In gratitude, the messenger presents him with ‘a side of Red Deere’.) This episode could have occurred no later than 1631, about thirteen years before Talbot's use of the sympathetic powder during Charles I's western campaign. By 1660 this episode would have been even less likely to have been within the recollection of Howell (or his possible sources) than the war stories involving Talbot.

77 From Digby's perspective, Howell had been a good subject on whom to fasten his tale of the cure because Howell was likely to have been slow to contradict Digby's story, if asked about it. Like Digby, Howell believed in sympathetic phenomena; he was Digby's old friend as well as his social inferior; and, in any case, he was conveniently in prison when Digby appears to have first involved him in the story of the cure, around 1649 or 1650.

78 Talbot appears to have retained some interest in matters pertaining to the sympathetic powder even beyond 1661. See an essay by him in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1665), 1, 375–6, entitled ‘A description of a Swedish stone, which affords sulphur, vitriol, allum and minium.’ Vitriol is the essential ingredient in the sympathetic powder. The evidence connecting Talbot with the powder suggests that Talbot, rather than Digby, was the model for ‘stout Orsin’ in Part I, Canto II, lines 199–240 of Samuel Butler's Hudibras; the character wears a ‘strange hermetick powder’ by his side and is associated with weapons and warfare. Both Petersson and Dobbs have assumed the character is an allusion to Digby.

79 Given the quasi-private nature of the Royal Society's meetings, and of the minutes based on them, any sense of vindication Talbot might have enjoyed as a result of the Fellows' deference would have existed within a socially limited context.

80 Sydney State Papers, Vol. II, 698, as cited in Longueville, op. cit. (22), 287. The context of Sidney's comment suggests that he was responding not to the publication of the Late Discourse but to remarks made by Digby in various social settings.

81 Ann, Lady Fanshawe, in The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe (ed. J. Loftis), Oxford, 1979, 122.

82 J. Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, 2 vols., London, 1950, ii, 272.

83 My thanks to Bruce Hunt for suggesting this point.