ht a duel in Paris with
a French lord who took Charles's name in vain, and killed his man too. His
role was always the intellectual one. He conspired for the cause--chiefly,
I think, out of personal friendship, and because he held it to be the cause
of his Church. He was not a virulent politician; and on the question of
divine right the orthodox Cavaliers must have felt him to be very unsound
indeed.

The era of Parliaments had now come, and Digby was to feel it. He was
summoned to the bar of the House as a Popish recusant. Charles was ordered
to banish him and Montague from his councils and his presence; and their
examination continued at intervals till the middle of 1642. The Queen
interceded for Digby with much warmth, but she was a dangerous friend; and
in the same year Montague and he were sent to prison. I have heard a
tradition that Crosby Hall was for a time his comfortable jail, but can
find no corroboration of this. The serjeant-at-arms confined him for a
brief space at The Three Tuns, near Charing Cross, "where his conversation
made the prison a place of delight" to his fellows. Later, at Winchester
House, Southwark, where he remained in honourable confinement for two
years, he was busy with writing and experimenting--to preserve him from "a
languishing and rusting leisure." Two pamphlets, both of them hasty
improvisations, one a philosophic commentary on a certain stanza of the
_Faerie Queen_, the other, his well-known _Observations on the 'Religio
Medici'_, are but mere bubbles of this seething activity, given over mostly
to the preparation of his _Two Treatises_, "Of the Body," and "Of the
Soul," published later in Paris, and to experiments on glass-making.

Many efforts were made for his release, the most efficacious by the Queen
of France. It should have been the Dowager Marie de Medicis, in memory of
her hot flame for him when he was a youth; but though she may have
initiated the appeal, she died before his release, which he seems to have
owed to Anne of Austria's good services. Freedom meant banishment, but this
sentence he did not take very seriously. In these years he was continually
going and coming between France and England, now warned by Parliament, now
tolerated, now banished, again daring return, and escaping from the net. "I
can compare him to nothing but to a great fish that we catch and let go
again; but still he will come to the bait," said Selden of him in his
_Table-Talk_.

Exile in Par