The stories of A Late Discourse

According to the title page of the early editions of Digby's essay, his discourse on the sympathetic powder was first delivered as an address to the faculty of the medical academy at Montpellier in 1657.Footnote ⁷ The published essay is both lengthy and digressive. Assuming it was indeed delivered originally as an oral address, parts of the printed work could have been added between oral presentation and publication. The majority of the essay, over 133 of its 152 small-format pages, not including front matter, is devoted, in Digby's words, to making ‘convincing proofs, that [the] Sympathetical cure may be done naturally’.Footnote ⁸ In these pages, Digby explains how the cure works, detailing ‘six or seven Principles’ that govern the operation of the powder. He illustrates each principle with anecdotes and ends with the triumphant claim that his discourse ‘hath convincingly shewed you, that in this Sympathetical cure, there is no need to admit of an action distant from the Patient’.Footnote ⁹

The beginning of Digby's essay is just as important as its body, however, for it formally establishes Digby as an authority on the powder. Near the start of the Late Discourse Digby assures his audience that ‘when you shall have understood this history [of Digby's acquisition and use of the cure], you will not accuse me of vanity, if I attribute unto my self the Introducer unto this Quarter of the World this way of curing’.Footnote ¹⁰ Then Digby relates, in formally realistic detail, the story of the injury James Howell received to his hand while intervening in a duel and of his own cure of Howell with the sympathetic powder:

At the end of this story Digby emphasizes that ‘this was presently reported to the Duke of Buckingham, and a little after to the King, who were both very curious to know the circumstance of the businesse’.Footnote ¹² Indeed, even before he tells the Howell story, Digby is careful to announce that the cure was effected under the eyes of ‘King James of England, who had a particular talent, and marvailous sagacity, to discusse natural things …; As also … his Sonne, the late King Charles, and the Duke of Buckingham, their prime Minister.’Footnote ¹³ In recounting his first-hand ‘experiment’ with the powder (to use ‘experiment’ in a sense considered acceptable in Digby's time) and in naming James I, Prince Charles, and Buckingham as his unimpeachable (if since deceased) witnesses, Digby adheres to protocols that, over the course of the seventeenth century, increasingly rendered experimental evidence credible for the purposes of what Steven Shapin has called ‘virtual witnessing’.Footnote ¹⁴ But the start of Digby's discourse includes another important narrative. This is meant to establish Digby not merely as an authority on the powder but also as its intellectual retailer. He becomes the source, for purposes of living memory, to whom by 1658 all the powder's western European users, whether noble or common, are ultimately indebted. When the king, impressed, asks Digby for the secret of the powder, Digby insists that he must tell the king

The stories of Howell and of the Carmelite monk, if taken together and as true, help in two important ways to solidify Digby's claim to priority regarding the powder. First, they locate Digby's use of the powder on Howell within a very specific period. Digby's reference to the ‘Duke of Toscany’ suggests Digby acquired the powder when in Italy on the grand tour between November 1620 and spring 1623. Howell was on the Continent between 1622 and some time in 1624. So if the cure were indeed effected under the eye of King James, the event must have occurred during 1624, after Howell had returned from the Continent and when Digby and Howell were both in England, or in early 1625, just before the king died.Footnote ¹⁶ Second, by locating Digby's cure of Howell around 1624, both stories place Digby's knowledge of the powder on the English scene well before the 1650s, when references to it start to appear in English publications besides Digby's own.Footnote ¹⁷ In fact, Digby's claim to have acquired the powder from the Carmelite monk in the early 1620s lets him imply that his knowledge of sympathetic cures in general pre-dates most of the controversies over them involving Robert Fludd and others in the 1620s and 1630s. Digby's eagerness to claim such a generalized authority may even have caused him temporarily to forget, as he wrote the Late Discourse, that his specific argument in this essay centres on a dry rather than an unctuous compound. After stating that he explained the use of the powder to James I, Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham, Digby boasts that the facts of the case were all ‘registred among the observations of the great Chancelor Bacon, to adde by way of Appendix, unto his Natural History’.Footnote ¹⁸ But Bacon's discussion of the sympathetic cure in Sylva Sylvarum (1627) makes no mention of Digby and is quite explicitly of the weapon-salve rather than of the powder.Footnote ¹⁹ The contradiction between Digby's assertion and Bacon's remarks in Sylva Sylvarum can only be explained if one holds either that Bacon speculated (in some detail) about the composition of the wrong cure, or that Digby's claim, at least insofar as it involved Bacon, is false.

Digby's unconvincing effort to make Bacon his intellectual debtor is not the only aspect of the Late Discourse that might, on the basis of the Discourse alone, lead one to doubt his claim to be the powder's first western European user. Born in 1603, Digby would have been only twenty or twenty-one years old when he supposedly received the powder from the monk and gave the secret of it to King James. Yet in his account Digby repeatedly portrays himself as a subject of deference from his elders and betters. He pictures himself as enjoying enough social prestige at a young age to perform a service that would pry a valued secret out of a monk who would not tell it even to the Duke of Tuscany. He describes himself, as a very young man, possessed of such moral and intellectual authority in his own country that the middle-aged king would beg him for his wisdom.Footnote ²⁰ In spite of these perplexities, readers of the Late Discourse since the eighteenth century have recurrently taken Digby's story about the Carmelite monk at face value and have universally regarded his story about Howell's injury and subsequent treatment as fact. This error persists in informal as well as more scholarly and authoritative sources, in biographies of Digby as well as in essays on the weapon-salve or powder.Footnote ²¹ Digby's biographers repeatedly give his tales a structural appearance of truthfulness by inserting the stories of the monk and of Howell's cure into accounts of Digby's life where they would appear were they true, without marking them as seriously suspect.Footnote ²²

The only students of Digby to express doubt about his tales in the Late Discourse, perhaps not surprisingly, have been historians of science familiar with the long and complex history of the weapon-salve. In his study of Van Helmont, the Jesuits and the salve, Mark Waddell briefly discusses Digby's powder and implicitly rejects the tale of the monk, treating it in terms of the tradition of ‘wonders’ explored by Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park. Waddell also rejects Digby's larger claim to priority, but only after pointedly conflating of the weapon-salve with the sympathetic powder and noting (accurately) that ‘descriptions of the curing of wounds over great distances had appeared decades before Digby himself’. Betty Jo Dobbs also rejects Digby's attempt to appropriate the powder, noting that vitriol ‘was already in use in England as an ordinary chemical medication by 1617’. But she goes on to speak of ‘Digby's Carmelite monk’ as a real individual and to give the ‘dramatic story of Howell's hand’ full narrative credit, stating that it ‘served to spread the knowledge of [the powder] to non-medical natural philosophers and to Galenic physicians who were generally opposed to the use of chemical medicines’.Footnote ²³ Dobbs's scepticism, like that of Waddell, depends upon a conflation of ‘salve’ and ‘powder’ and therefore ignores the devices through which Digby made his particular priority claim. Her critical interests, like Waddell's, let her ignore the question of why Digby bothered to tell the story about Howell or the story of the Carmelite monk at all.

The case against Digby

Both the story of the monk and that of Howell's cure are false. While the evidence that proves this is mostly circumstantial, it is abundant. First, the Carmelite monk is clearly an example of a type of character found in romances popular in the seventeenth century. Any modern reader familiar with such works would inevitably question the monk's status as a historical figure. As Vittorio Gabrieli has observed, ‘The Carmelite friar [of the Late Discourse] has a general resemblance to the wandering Egyptian sage Calasiris in Heliodorus's Ethiopian Story’, a work upon which Digby drew for his own autobiographical romance, Loose Fantasies, written in 1628 but not published until after his death.Footnote ²⁴ According to Gabrieli, Heliodorus's work is only one of numerous romances whose influence is apparent in the Loose Fantasies. Others include Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Sidney's Arcadia and Emanuel Ford's Ornatus and Artesia. Digby's attachment to Heliodorus in particular is evinced in his use of a Calasiris figure at a critical juncture in his own autobiographical romance. To help contextualize the Carmelite of the Late Discourse, it is worth noting that Digby's Calasiris figure in the Loose Fantasies (there called a ‘Brachman’) performs magic. His chief function is to summon a spirit who takes the form of the hero's beloved and who reassures him of her fidelity in spite of their recent separation. After conjuring this spirit, the Brachman disappears from the narrative entirely.

By attending to the generic conventions upon which Digby drew in the Late Discourse, one can understand his Carmelite monk as a later, equally fictional, version of the Brachman, stripped of the Brachman's more obviously magical powers.Footnote ²⁵ Both the Brachman and the Carmelite are travellers loosely associated with the East, both possess information vital to their interlocutors, both have an interest in natural philosophy. The Brachman conjures the apparition for Theagenes after making a protracted disquisition on free will, the reality of astral influences and the ability of spirits to act upon human and other material bodies. Despite the fictionality of Digby's Calasiris figures, his use of them in both his autobiographical romance and his essay on the sympathetic powder illustrates the readiness with which writers of his day employed the romance and its elements to canvass natural-philosophical and other issues, as well as the love relationships with which romances were often preoccupied. As the author of Eliana put it in 1661, ‘Romances are not always farc'd with Love-stories and toyes, though those are intertexted for delight … things Oeconomical, Ethical, Physical, Metaphysical, Philosophical, Political, and Theological as well as Amatory, may be, not unaptly, nor unfitly exhibited.’Footnote ²⁶ The specifically natural-philosophical use of romance tropes is vivid and pronounced in such works as the Chemical Wedding (1616), a Hermetic allegory which appears in part to code various alchemical processes as the courtly interactions of knights, a virgin, a bird, a snake and other exotic figures.Footnote ²⁷ The use is less phantasmagoric but still visible in the work of Robert Boyle, whose own autobiographical Account of Philaretus was written as a ‘real-life romance’.Footnote ²⁸

The abandonment of the romance as a vehicle for natural-philosophical speculation in favour of the more formally realistic modes of narrative that would authorize virtual witnessing is perhaps a hallmark of later seventeenth-century English science.Footnote ²⁹ Digby's reworking of the magical Brachman into the generous, itinerant, but essentially mundane monk in the Late Discourse, together with his use of more circumstantial testimony in the story of Howell's cure, places Digby's rhetorical practice in 1658 at the active centre of this historical shift. But as the first phase of Digby's real effort to establish himself as the original English authority on the sympathetic powder, the tale of the Carmelite monk, even were it true, would fail were the story about Howell's cure false. On its own, the tale of the monk allows Digby to claim he possessed the cure in 1624, whether he did so or not. But without the story of Howell's cure, Digby's possession of the recipe for the powder in 1624 would have no public meaning. It is therefore crucial for any negative assessment of Digby's claims in the Late Discourse that his story of Howell's cure be just as false as his story of the monk. To establish this, one need not rely solely on considerations of genre.

The first piece of evidence indicating the falsehood of the Howell story comes from Digby's own work. Digby had discussed the sympathetic cure well before 1658. This was in Part I, Chapter XVIII of his Two Treatises (1644), where he devotes a brief paragraph to the cure and defends it as legitimate. But in Two Treatises Digby never mentions the monk or the cure of Howell. It is hard to understand why he missed the opportunity to give a full account of his experience with the sympathetic powder, a cure he had supposedly acquired through merit and presented to King James with pride, if in fact he had already used it by 1644. Even if one imagines that Digby omitted these stories (implausibly) out of modesty or (more credibly) out of a sense that they would interrupt the flow of his larger argument in Two Treatises, it is still puzzling that he refers to the cure as a ‘salve or powder’ each time it is mentioned. Digby mentions the cure explicitly on three occasions in Part I, Chapter XVIII of Two Treatises. Each time he does so, he refers to it by two names rather than one: as ‘the weapons salue, or the sympathetike pouder’, as ‘the pouder, or salue’, and as ‘the salue or pouder’.Footnote ³⁰ If Digby's story about Howell's treatment were true, one might expect that in his discussion of the ‘salue or pouder’ in Two Treatises he might at least have offered a quick assertion that powdered vitriol is after all the best version of the sympathetic cure, then used the term ‘pouder’ consistently thereafter, in conformity with his own recipe. Yet Digby never to any extent narrows the ‘salve’ to the ‘powder’ in the Two Treatises. His consistently mixed terminology for the cure suggests that in 1644 he was indifferent as to its texture. More specifically, it suggests he had not been compelled to decide upon a particular recipe for it before writing about it in Two Treatises, twenty years after the date at which he later claimed to have dissolved a batch of the powder in water and used it to cure Howell.

Awareness of Digby's self-indictment in Two Treatises illuminates other details associated with the story of the powder. These are details that put the Howell narrative further in doubt, but might not be regarded as significant without the context of Digby's differing discussions of the sympathetic cure. First, as Roy Digby Thomas has observed, there is no evidence that Digby ever used the powder between 1624 and 1658 at times when he might have been expected to do so. These include occasions when numbers of his men were injured during the sea battles associated with his privateering venture at Scanderoon in 1628.Footnote ³¹ Second, Digby gave two dates for his supposed cure of Howell in contexts outside the Late Discourse. Neither fully agrees with the other nor with the date established so pointedly in the Late Discourse itself. Digby may have been speaking only loosely when in 1656 he claimed to John Winthrop Jr. that he was the first to bring the powder to England and France ‘35. Yeares agone’.Footnote ³² But 1624 is closer to thirty than to thirty-five years before 1656. In the preface to his 1650 translation of Van Helmont's essay on the weapon-salve, A Ternary of Paradoxes, Walter Charleton tells a slightly abbreviated version of the story of Digby's cure of Howell, saying that Digby told him that the event had occurred ‘not many yeers past’.Footnote ³³ Even if 1624 might be regarded loosely as thirty-five years before 1656, it is certainly more than ‘not many yeers’ before 1650.Footnote ³⁴

More intriguingly, James Howell himself made a ribald joke about actions at a distance in a letter written in 1635; in so doing he referred explicitly to the weapon-salve rather than to the sympathetic powder. Says Howell,

Even though the ‘weapon’ aspect of the ‘weapon-salve’ is crucial to making Howell's metaphorical joke work in this instance, Howell might have told his anecdote in a different way had he had the experience of being cured dramatically through the use of a garter and a ‘powder’ rather than a weapon and a ‘salve’. At the very least, he might not have referred to the oily nature of the compound so specifically (unguentum armarium) in reminding his correspondent of his medical analogy. He would have been fully aware that more than one recipe for the ‘salve or cure’ was in existence.Footnote ³⁶

Perhaps the most important evidence that Digby's entire claim to have introduced the powder into western Europe is false, however, comes from Digby's fellow natural philosophers. Their testimony supplies us with the name of the man who probably was the first to make frequent and public use of the powder of sympathy in England. Within a space of two years, both Walter Charleton and Nathaniel Highmore, neither of whom had reason to prevaricate, wrote treatises in which they associated the powder with Sir Gilbert Talbot. In the introduction to his Ternary of Paradoxes (1650), after describing Digby's supposed cure of Howell at some length, Charleton briefly mentions Talbot's use of the powder during the Civil War:

This statement refers to events that have a plausible time and place. Talbot was a colonel in the army of Charles I and by 1650 had served as governor of Tiverton, where he was taken prisoner at a battle in 1645 by Parliamentary forces under Thomas Fairfax.Footnote ³⁸ As Charles I's physician in ordinary, Charleton may have attended the king in his western campaigns in 1644. In this capacity he may have heard of, or even witnessed, Talbot's use of the cure before his defeat.Footnote ³⁹ Nathaniel Highmore's association of the powder with Talbot, only one year after Charleton's, is even more direct. Appended to Highmore's The History of Generation (as indicated on the title page) is a ‘Discourse of the Cure of Wounds by Sympathy Or without any real applycation of Medicines to the part affected, but especially by that Powder, known chiefly by the name of Sir Gilbert Talbot's Powder’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Highmore effectively identifies the powder as Talbot's own.

Highmore's identification of the powder with Talbot should be regarded as conclusive. The best evidence for this appears in the minutes of the meetings of the Royal Society for 1661. Talbot was admitted to the society on 22 May of that year, and at the second meeting thereafter, on 5 June, he was specifically called upon as an authority on the sympathetic powder, even though Digby, also a member, was in the room.Footnote ⁴¹ The first entry for this date reports that ‘Sir KENELME DIGBY brought in the stones mentioned by him at the meeting of the 22d of May, and called by him oculus mundi.’ The fifth entry for the same meeting states, ‘Magnetical cures being then discoursed of, Sir GILBERT TALBOT promised to communicate what he knew of sympathetical cures; and those members, who had any of the powder of sympathy, were desired to bring some of it at the next meeting.’Footnote ⁴² In subsequent meetings (19 and 26 June), ‘Sir GILBERT TALBOT's experiments of the sympathetic powder were ordered to be registered’, and ‘Dr. ENT, Dr. CLARKE, Dr. GODDARD, and Dr. WHISTLER, were appointed curators of the proposal made by Sir GILBERT TALBOT, of tormenting a man with the sympathetic powder’.Footnote ⁴³ In none of these meetings, to the extent that the minutes tell us, was Digby asked specifically for information regarding the powder. Despite Digby's relation of the Howell story to Charleton before 1650, Digby's more knowledgeable contemporaries had started to identify the powder with Talbot by 1651. Despite his publication of the Late Discourse in 1658, Digby's fellow members of the Royal Society appear pointedly to have deferred to Talbot rather than to Digby for information on the powder three years later. The group's action would constitute a deliberate insult to Digby unless the members of the group knew that Digby had no right to be offended by it, whatever his feelings. Whatever had happened between 1650 and 1661 had, in their eyes, discredited any claims to ownership of the powder that Digby had made in 1658 or before.

Digby under siege

Given the evidence against Digby's claims starting to appear in 1650 and 1651, apparently conclusive by 1661, one might ask why Digby put forward his claim to have introduced the powder as he did and why he did so in 1658. The answers to these questions inevitably involve some speculation. But that which follows is borne out by the available evidence. Digby was certainly eager to claim credit for the cure. In the face of such declarations as Highmore's, the only way to do this was to erase Sir Gilbert Talbot's name from the history of the powder. Digby's Carmelite monk serves as a spectral point of origin that conveniently allows Digby to be substituted for Talbot as the cure's western European retailer. Digby's willingness to shape the truth in order to claim the powder as his own suggests, among other things, that by 1658 the sympathetic cure had in various forms become so well known that the powder was a commodity worth appropriating. There is a deep irony attached to the fact that the moment of the powder's peak value on the intellectual market coincided with the period in which natural philosophers began putting it to extensive trials and eventually caused it to be rejected as a valid phenomenon. Digby's desire to have his name attached to the powder may in part reflect the same desire to present himself as universally accomplished that caused him to lie about other of his achievements.Footnote ⁴⁴ As Digby's biographers have all pointed out, Digby modelled himself on the ideal of the gentleman found in such works as Castiglione's The Courtier, an ideal that included the notion that the true gentleman possessed sprezzatura: he did all things with effortless superiority.Footnote ⁴⁵ But even if Digby wrote the Late Discourse as an effort to shore up his self-image in this spurious manner, why did he wait until 1658 to do it? Digby appears to have borrowed from Highmore, since his explanation of the powder's operation in the Late Discourse follows a pattern of enumerated principles that strongly resembles Highmore's, even though such an explanatory method is nowhere apparent in Digby's discussion of the cure in Two Treatises. One can then ask why Digby would not have published the Late Discourse as soon after Highmore's treatise as possible so as to foreclose the possibility of his contemporaries' views of the matter being polluted by seeing Talbot's name on Highmore's title page.Footnote ⁴⁶

Several of the anecdotes with which Digby illustrates his ‘six or seven Principles’ in the Late Discourse suggest that in part the essay served as an opportunity for Digby to reassure his fellow Stuart adherents of his continued loyalty to the cause at a time when his bona fides along these lines had come under some suspicion, and when the restoration of the Stuarts to the English throne had begun to seem possible. Digby was a recusant Catholic appointed Chancellor in Exile by Henrietta Maria around 1644. Between the early 1640s and 1660 he worked steadily to gain political toleration for Catholics in England. As Digby's negotiations with Innocent X to gain papal support for the Royalist cause collapsed in the late 1640s, Digby engaged in an attempt to establish a separate English Catholic church with the help of a group called Blacklo's Cabal. When this effort in turn failed, he began to curry favour with Cromwell. He had such success that some of his allies grumbled about his behaviour.Footnote ⁴⁷ While Digby's political aims remained more or less constant during this period, his methods of achieving them appeared increasingly opportunistic and self-serving to more than a few of his allies. So by 1658 Digby must have felt a need to remind the Royalists generally of his historically close relations with the Stuarts, in order to retain his credibility and his position of authority among the loyalist faction as a whole.

In this context, the publication of the Late Discourse provided Digby with an opportunity to remind his English readers of his past connections both with James I and his son. This was an opportunity upon which he pointedly capitalized. The first and most extensive instance of this in Digby's essay is his story of James I's interest in Howell's supposed cure, in which the King is portrayed at some length as the youthful Digby's admirer and friend. But an equally developed piece of politically motivated storytelling occurs when in the Late Discourse Digby illustrates his sixth principle, that atoms of a like nature have a ‘resemblance, and Sympathy … one with the other’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Here he describes the ‘strange antipathy which the late King James had to a naked sword’, and he explains this phenomenon as an instance of prenatal imprinting, supposedly caused by the sympathetic relation between the mother and her unborn child:

Digby completes this anecdote by telling that King James looked away and his hand shook when he knighted Digby; the episode as a whole allows Digby to express sympathy (as it were) for Mary Stuart while reminding his audience of the favour he had received at royal hands in 1623 and, implicitly, of the services for which such favour had been given.

A third point at which Digby reminds his readers of his intimacy with the Stuart family is in his lengthy reference to his 1628 privateering venture in Scanderoon, in his illustrations for the second principle of the Late Discourse. This venture was one that Digby had undertaken with the support of Charles I and it earned him considerable renown. So Digby's reference to it allows him to remind his readers, however obliquely, that he had been just as useful to Charles I as to James I.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the same vein, albeit much more generally, Digby identifies his view of the operation of the powder with the Royalist cause directly when earlier in his explanation of the second principle he refers to light atoms as ‘Cavaliers, mounted on winged coursers’.Footnote ⁵¹ This usage may even mark a political intensification of similar language in the Two Treatises, for in his earlier work Digby uses the term ‘horsemen’ rather than ‘cavaliers’ when he discusses atoms riding on light beams in Chapter X of Part I, on gravity, levity and local motion.Footnote ⁵² But the stories that Digby tells in the Late Discourse relating to Scanderoon, to Mary Stuart and to James I's fear of swords are not essential to his discussions of the principles they are meant to elucidate. They duplicate points made by other examples Digby offers; the story of Mary Stuart is even told as a digression within a digression and is labelled as such by Digby.Footnote ⁵³ The fact that Digby proliferates examples in a way that Highmore, for example, does not helps explain why Digby's essay on the powder is so much longer than Highmore's and lacks its explanatory efficiency, in spite of the fact that both discussions enumerate relevant and similar principles to explain how the powder works. Digby's anecdotes are political embroidery on a natural-philosophical argument to which they are not absolutely necessary. The powder as such is clearly Digby's central interest in the Late Discourse. So the question remains of why Digby wrote his essay when and as he did.Footnote ⁵⁴

The answer to this question appears to have everything to do with the publication in 1654 of Walter Charleton's Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana. This translation and expansion of part of Gassendi's Animadversiones includes a very brief section on the weapon-salve or sympathetic powder at the end of Book III, Chapter XV, in which Charleton retracts his support for the idea that the cure works, reversing the position he had taken in his translation of Van Helmont's essay on the subject four years earlier. Charleton's repudiation of the salve or powder is visibly tied to his broader shifts in thinking about the nature of matter between 1650 and 1654 and he gives three general reasons for his change of view.Footnote ⁵⁵ The second is doubt about the existence of a world soul or anima mundi that transfers the power of sympathetic agents across great distances; while the third is a conviction that wounds treated with the weapon-salve or powder were more likely to have been healed ‘meerly by the goodness of Nature it self’ than by a cure at distance, since the natural healing of wounds was promoted by the washing with urine and lack of binding stipulated in the use of the weapon-salve or powder. Near the end of his discussion, Charleton states that he has made ‘frequent Experiments’ with the cure since 1650 which have shown him ‘the downright Inefficacy and Unsuccessfulness as well of the Armary Unguent, as Sympathetick Powder, even in small, shallow, and in dangerous Wounds’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Most importantly Charleton's retraction is riddled with hints that fraud is widespread in accounts of the cure's successful operation. It is this, as much as anything, that has made him change his mind about it. It is this, as much as anything, from which he wishes to distance himself with his formal repudiation of his earlier position. The very first reason Charleton gives for his altered perspective is this:

Nowhere in his discussion of the salve or powder does Charleton mention Digby or his story about Howell. Indeed, Charleton refers to Digby several times with regard to other issues in the Physiologia as a whole, always politely and sometimes flatteringly. But none of this should be taken as meaning that Charleton did not have Digby prominently in mind when he spoke of the ‘Fabulous’ stories told about the sympathetic cure in this passage, or that Charleton's publication of his doubts about the ‘Impostures’ regarding the cure did not constitute both a coded jab at the truthfulness of Digby's story about Howell and a public apology for Charleton's own promulgation of that story in his earlier work. As Steven Shapin has explained, in an era in which one did not accuse a gentleman of lying without running the risk of being challenged to a duel, charges of mendacity were typically made, when made at all, through circumlocution.Footnote ⁵⁸ For someone like Charleton, the stakes involved in accusing Digby of lying would have been especially high, given that Digby's social position was far above Charleton's, even though they had friends in common as Stuart adherents and as natural philosophers. At the end of his discussion of the salve or powder, however, Charleton states that he is

The posture with which Charleton ends his discussion of the salve or powder shows clearly that his aim therein is not only to apologize for his former error at the expense of his own pride, but also to elevate his own honesty above the false claims of the ‘plausible and splendid’. The phrase ‘plausible and splendid’, with the subtle irony implied by the term ‘plausible’, would describe Digby as well as anyone in his age.

Charleton's implicit repudiation of Digby's story about Howell in the Physiologia serves as a paradigmatic example of the approach that may have been taken generally in the seventeenth century when someone wished to challenge the word of a genteel contemporary in print. Clearly, however, such a coded accusation as Charleton's would only have functioned fully, as both an indictment and an apology, to the extent that the need for it were already known to some of the author's readers. We can thus perhaps begin to reconstruct the scenario that led not only to Charleton's implicit indictment of Digby in the Physiologia, but also to Digby's publication of a full-blown reiteration of the Howell story, with the story of the Carmelite monk added, in the Late Discourse. Crucial to the whole course of events is the fact that the man at the centre of Digby's fabrication about his use of the powder before 1650, James Howell, was in Fleet Prison between 1643 and 1651, therefore not easily available to confirm or deny any stories involving him that might have circulated among interested parties before his release.Footnote ⁶⁰ It is possible that Howell became familiar with the existence of Digby's fabrication only after 1651, after reading either Highmore's treatise or Charleton's translation of Van Helmont, or after hearing about it second-hand. It is probable, however, that Charleton discovered that Digby's tale was false only after Howell left prison, when the facts of the matter could have been more readily communicated to him from Howell, either directly or through intermediaries. Whatever Howell may have felt about the situation, it is easy to imagine Charleton feeling defensive and embarrassed, for his publication of Digby's story in A Ternary of Paradoxes had, through no fault of his own, made him party to the promulgation of an untruth. He would have had reason to want the matter cleared up formally, especially if his contemporaries had begun to hear of it. The longer the story stood without public contradiction, the more his own credibility would have been compromised by his apparent acceptance of a wholesale invention.

Charleton may have written his rejection of the powder or salve in the Physiologia as he did in order to contain the spread of gossip that affected him personally, to vindicate his own reliability while casting a shadow on Digby's; or he may have written it simply to satisfy his own integrity. In either case, Charleton's implicit challenge to Digby's story about Howell in the Physiologia apparently called Digby's credibility into question palpably enough for Digby to feel that it warranted a response. Digby believed in the powder as an exemplary sympathetic phenomenon and would have wanted to defend it in any case. So when the Physiologia appeared, he may have realized that the only way to defend both the powder and his honour was forcefully to repeat his story about Howell, to make it longer and more detailed and to add to it a story that would allow him to place his own acquisition of the powder in an era well before the Civil War, thereby supplanting every possible English claimant of it since the early 1620s, especially Talbot. In this light, Digby's monk story in the Late Discourse is anything but a piece of baroque whimsy. It is a pointedly artificial effort to give further credence to a fabrication that Digby had already put forward in more contemporarily credible terms, one that had already been recognized as a fabrication. If writing the Late Discourse also gave him a chance to ingratiate himself with the Stuarts or to attach the cure to mendicant Catholicism, away from any of the religious controversies in which it had been embroiled by the 1650s, so much the better.

Reactions to the Late Discourse

The sympathetic powder, as opposed to the weapon-salve, became well known after the Late Discourse appeared and it became firmly associated with Digby in the public mind in the process. Digby was perhaps fortunate in the fact that seventeen years after his death his laboratory operator, George Hartman, helped reaffirm his claim to the powder, while capitalizing on Digby's celebrity, by publishing the recipe for the powder in A Choice Collection of rare Secrets and Experiments … Collected and Experimented by the Honourable and truly Learned Sir Kenelm Digby, Kt. … Hitherto kept Secret since his Decease, but now Published for the good and benefit of the Publick (1682).Footnote ⁶¹ After Hartman's collection appeared, the powder became and remained Digby's intellectual property even though Talbot had been its first well-known user and Highmore had written an earlier, more compact and more coherent explanation of its operation. In the early eighteenth century, for example, the powder was straightforwardly associated with Digby while also being touted as a quackish cure-all, a medicament that appeared to have left its original associations with swords and stab wounds far behind. The English Post for March of 1702 advertised ‘Sir Kenelm Digby's Incomparable Apoplectic Powder or Snuff. Which at once, or at the most three times using of it (with God's blessing) absolutely cures the apolexy [sic] and lethargy also vapours, drowsiness, importunes, dizziness, and heaviness of the head …’.Footnote ⁶²

The most notable writers to yoke Digby's name to the powder after the Late Discourse appeared were Joseph Glanvill and Thomas Sprat. In The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661) Glanvill states that

In the History of the Royal Society (1667) Sprat discusses a poison that can apparently injure at a distance and observes that the phenomenon ‘is not strange to those who study Sympathy; And set belief in that much renowned Sympathetical Powder of Sir Kenelme Digby’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Both these writers joined the Royal Society at least two years after the powder of sympathy was discussed at its meetings in 1661, however, and they may have known nothing of Digby's fabrications or of Charleton's or Howell's involvement with them.Footnote ⁶⁵ Indeed, Charleton's handling of Digby's claims in the Physiologia had been crafted specifically to hint at the truth while keeping those claims from spreading. Far from being live gossip, the story of Digby's attempt to appropriate the powder may well have been dead, like Digby himself, by 1678, when Robert Midgley (never a Fellow of the society) defended the reality of sympathetic phenomena by citing the operations of the ‘Sympathetick Powder’, and Digby's particular explication of them, in A New Treatise of Naturall Philosophy.Footnote ⁶⁶ In any case, the focus of Glanvill's, Sprat's and Midgley's comments alike is Digby's explanation of the way the powder works rather than his claim to have introduced it to the Occident. Glanvill's particular obliviousness to the priority issue is registered in the fact that he refers to Digby's cure as a ‘medicine’ instead of a ‘powder’ and alludes to its application to weapons.

The use of ‘salve’ and ‘powder’ as interchangeable terms of reference, seen in Glanvill's remarks, was in fact commonplace after the 1650s. This suggests that Digby's effort in the Late Discourse to draw a clear distinction between the ‘salve’ and the ‘powder’, even for purely discursive purposes, was unsuccessful from the outset. The ‘salve’ had become fixed in the public mind before the ‘powder’ was ever introduced. Robert Boyle used both terms, more or less interchangeably, to refer to the sympathetic cure in Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Natural Philosophy in 1663, then again in Some Philosophical Essays in 1669. John Webster (1677), Gideon Harvey (1696) and H. M. Herwig (1700) all used similarly double-barrelled language in their references to the sympathetic cure after the 1660s.Footnote ⁶⁷ Whatever recipe actual experimenters may have used for the cure after the Late Discourse appeared, the ‘weapon-salve’ did not disappear from public view just because the ‘sympathetic powder’ had been brought to notice. If anything, the ‘weapon-salve’ retained a kind of resonance in the public imagination that the ‘powder of sympathy’ had never had, no doubt because of the salve's literal association with weapons and warfare. In 1660 Edward Stillingfleet wrote a treatise outlining what he presented as principles of theological moderation for the post-Restoration Church, and he titled it Irenicum. A weapon-salve for the Churches wounds.Footnote ⁶⁸ For at least two decades thereafter, as Stillingfleet's antagonists repeatedly took issue with his right to use the comparison, the weapon-salve, as a cure that worked by ‘sympathy’, enjoyed a minor career as a metaphor for moderate theology, anticipating the eventual drift of ‘sympathy’ out of natural-philosophical and into ethical discourse entirely.Footnote ⁶⁹ In 1665, for example, the puritan John Brown mocked Stillingfleet for his metaphor and charged that his theology was really an antipathetic rather than a sympathetic cure for discord within the Church.Footnote ⁷⁰ Similarly, Vincent Alsop stated in 1678 that instead of seeing a cure for the Church's wounds in theology such as Stillingfleet's, he saw ‘a weapon ready drawn to render them more wide, and more incurable’.Footnote ⁷¹

The most important reaction to Digby's Late Discourse, however, was undoubtedly Howell's. Digby's biographers have generally assumed that Howell never responded to Digby's work and that his silence with regard to Digby's story about curing him constituted assent to it.Footnote ⁷² But Howell did respond to Digby's story after the Late Discourse appeared, in a section of his political-allegorical romance published in 1660, entitled Therologia, The parly of beasts, or, Morphandra, queen of the inchanted iland. This work is a series of satires on people of different nations and professions – a Dutch mariner, a French peasant, a Genoese merchant, a Venetian courtesan and others – who have been transformed into animals by Queen Morphandra but who refuse to be turned back into humans because they loathe the failings of their countrymen. At the start of the Seventh Section, Queen Morphandra and Prince Pererius (who quizzes the various animals on their histories and views) discuss the nature of Morphandra's transformative power and agree that it is not malevolent even though it is wonderful. It resembles the operation of the sympathetic cure. Pererius says,

At Morphandra's request, Pererius offers a lengthy description of how ‘the Sympatheticall Powder or Medicine’ works, and that description resembles both Digby's and Highmore's, generally in its delineation of ‘universall Laws or Maxims of nature’ that govern the powder's operation, more narrowly in its designation of atoms and their movements as the central agents in the process.

Howell's discussion of the cure might seem at first to be an endorsement not merely of the sympathetic powder but also of Digby's specific authority as its first western European user. But as a paean to Digby, Howell's account is extraordinarily pallid. Howell never mentions Digby's name when he introduces the subject of the powder, even though he compliments Digby pointedly on another issue elsewhere in the Therologia.Footnote ⁷⁴ Instead, Howell's character Pererius uses an awkwardly passive construction when the cure is introduced (‘of late years ther is found out’), and while this locution might be seen as lending a grand timelessness to the principles of sympathy governing the cure, it also evades the question of the cure's intellectual provenance. The circuitousness of Howell's phrasing, together with his favourable reference to Digby elsewhere in Therologia, should alert us to the possibility that some part of Howell's discussion of the powder is actually meant to challenge Digby's, given the fact that Charleton followed the same general protocols when repudiating Digby's story about Howell in the Physiologia. Indeed, when Pererius goes on to relate his one and only example of how the cure is used, he tells a tale that resembles Digby's story about Howell in some respects but that differs from it on significant points:

Here, as in Digby's story about curing Howell, the powder is used in the context of a duel and is in some way associated with peace-making. But with this the resemblance ends. In Howell's account, the man who uses the cure is also the one who stops the duel, not, as in Digby's version, a separate person. The powder is used on two men rather than one, and, most importantly, the context of the whole episode is clearly military. Specifically, the cure is used by a ‘captain’, and the men on whom he uses it are his ‘officers’. Assuming that this anecdote refers to some real episode even though it appears in a fictive context, it is hard to see how it could refer to Digby's cure of Howell, at least as recounted by Digby. Digby was never a military man, and outside his role as head of a privateering venture in 1628, he never had occasion to be referred to as ‘captain’. If the episode refers to a real event, its characters and situation suggest a cure performed by Talbot rather than Digby.Footnote ⁷⁶ In this instance, the fact that Howell never mentions his own name in connection with the episode should be regarded as significant, given that topical and contemporary references, with names appended, do appear elsewhere in Therologia. By 1658 Howell and Digby had been friends for decades and Howell certainly believed in the efficacy of the sympathetic powder as much as did Digby. If Howell had been cured by Digby in 1624 and was in a position to endorse Digby's story about him publicly after 1658, why did he not do so in Therologia, one of his first publications to appear after Digby's Late Discourse? The most logical answer to this question is that the story about the captain and his men actually constitutes a muted correction of Digby's story about Howell, a replacement of a known but questionable account with something vaguely phrased and not visibly attached to living individuals, but something that might have conformed more closely to the experience of people who had had first-hand experience with the issue under consideration.

Howell's repudiation of Digby in Therologia is so gentle as to make Charleton's in the Physiologia seem almost harsh by comparison. Unlike Charleton's discussion, Howell's offers no clues to the reader that his account is meant to overturn an erroneous point of view that the reader might possess, or that it is meant to do so despite the fact that the likely source of the erroneous position is nowhere mentioned. Howell buries his discussion of the sympathetic powder deep in the text of Therologia, more than halfway through it, even though the issue his discussion purportedly illustrates, the nature of Queen Morphandra's powers, might reasonably have been taken up at the outset of the narrative. Howell's use of a fictive context to canvass the issue, as opposed to a formal treatise or essay, in itself sets his correction of Digby at maximum distance from the contemporary world and affords him what one might call a wide zone of deniability. The subtlety of Howell's correction might even suggest a certain reluctance on the author's part to broach the very subject of the powder, given the extent to which he hides the issue in the process of discussing it. Perhaps Howell had been quizzed about Digby's story to the point of fatigue between the publication of the Late Discourse and 1660, and while he had not minded appearing in the story because he, too, believed in the powder, he had no desire to embarrass his aristocratic friend by issuing a refutation yet felt a need to put the matter behind him.Footnote ⁷⁷ It is even possible that Howell discussed the powder in Therologia because Charleton, or even Talbot himself, had urged Howell to do so. Digby's inclusion of the monk story in the Late Discourse meant that Digby's claims had finally involved Talbot personally, for they effectively constituted theft of what Talbot may have regarded as his intellectual property.Footnote ⁷⁸ For his part, Charleton had reason to feel annoyed by Digby's stories in the Late Discourse, even apart from the fact that they were told in order to endorse a phenomenon about which he had become sceptical after 1651. Charleton had attempted to dislodge Digby's fabrication about Howell in the Physiologia in 1654, and all he had received for his pains was a longer and more elaborate version of the same story, compounded by another.

Whatever Howell's motives, his discussion of the sympathetic powder in Therologia perhaps gave Talbot some sense of vindication as the powder's first English user, although that vindication might have felt more substantial to Talbot after he was asked for information on the powder by the Fellows of the Royal Society in 1661.Footnote ⁷⁹ The private papers of one of Digby's contemporaries do reveal an explicit charge that Digby's claims about the powder were fraudulent. Some time in 1658, when both Digby and Algernon Sidney were in Germany, Sidney wrote to a correspondent to say that Digby had been travelling under the name of ‘Earle Digby, Admirall of the British seas, and Chancellor to the Queene of England’ and had ‘pretended to be the first inventor of the Sympatheticall Powder, and magnetick Cures of Wounds and Diseases’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Given Sidney's anti-Catholicism, one might write his accusation off as partisan mud-slinging, were it not that Digby's friends also commented privately on Digby's unsteady relationship with the truth, albeit without particular reference to the sympathetic powder. Recalling a dinner she had attended with Digby in late 1648, Lady Ann Fanshawe observed in her memoirs that Digby loved to enlarge upon ‘extraordinary stories’, and that this ‘was his infirmity’.Footnote ⁸¹ John Evelyn reported in his Diary, in an entry for 7 November 1651,

As much as their content, the tone of Evelyn's comments, with their unsurprised and slightly impatient dismissal of Digby's falseness, suggests that at least some of Digby's peers were inured to his fabulations. If Digby were capable of pushing even willing and respectful listeners to their epistemological limits, in an age when ‘extraordinary stories’ were regarded with unprecedented analytical seriousness, he was also apparently forgiven for his narrative inventions on a regular basis. In this light, the repudiations of Charleton and Howell are especially noteworthy as cases in which the practice of forgiving Digby in this manner was, however quietly, suspended.

Conclusion

The story of Digby's fabrications in the Late Discourse has a variety of implications. The most immediate applies to future biographical work on Digby and studies of his relations with his contemporaries, whether intellectual, diplomatic or personal. The stories of the Carmelite monk and of the cure of Howell have hitherto been perpetuated as truths in accounts of Digby's life and work but should be clearly identified as wholesale inventions. Moreover, the fact that the story of the powder shows Digby to have been capable of complex and premeditated fabulation should occasion a systematic reassessment of all scholarly assertions about his life made on the basis of his word alone, especially when his claims would have enhanced his reputation on points that mattered to him, such as his authority as a natural philosopher, his finesse as a courtier, his courage as a duelist or his appeal as a lover. More narrowly, such a reassessment involves taking anything from Digby's account of his life, whether in the Loose Fantasies or in the Late Discourse, as historically true only when it can be corroborated by reliable outside sources. It is not enough to discuss Digby's ‘lying infirmity’ for a few pages at the end of a biographical account, as does R. T. Petersson in his own work, if one relies elsewhere on Digby's uncorroborated tales of his own exploits. Digby was a person of note as well as a man of genuine ability: the stories he told about himself were often meant to aggrandize his legitimate talents and achievements. But we do neither Digby nor ourselves a service if we take his mendacity out of the general texture of his affairs, or if we write it off as roguishly amusing out of a fascination with the romantic elements of his life story.

The story of Digby and the sympathetic powder helps enrich our sense of the motives that governed early modern experimentalism, even as it illustrates the overlap between natural-philosophical writing and various forms of prose fiction in the seventeenth century. Digby's story about Howell's cure in the Late Discourse, with its use of first-person narration, its circumstantial detail and its invocation of well-born witnesses, all in the service of an apparent falsehood, reveals clearly the chief weakness of the ideal of experimental reportage developed by Boyle and others to allow for what Shapin has called virtual witnessing: a good fabulator could report as vividly, and enumerate as many details, as an honest experimenter.Footnote ⁸³ Digby wrote at a time when palpable fictions and testable hypotheses were sometimes indistinguishable. If, since the seventeenth century, students of Digby have generally failed to recognize his stories in the Late Discourse as inventions, it is not merely because, given the powder's status as a non-phenomenon, there has appeared to be nothing at stake in the claim those stories were meant to validate. It is also because modern readers have been accustomed to seeing false testimony challenged on more openly combative and in generically different terms. The use of the romance and its elements, both in the Late Discourse and in Howell's response to it, should remind us that early modern natural-philosophical debate is sometimes to be found in generically unexpected places, and that discovering an oblique repudiation of a truth claim in the context of a romance may be far more difficult than pointing out the overt denunciations found in formal disquisitions.