persons of the kingdom.
Kenelm might have seemed destined to obscurity; but there was that about
the youth that roused interest; and even the timid King James was attracted
by him into a magnanimous forgetfulness of his father's offence.
Nevertheless, he could never have had the easy destiny of other young men
of his class, unless he had been content to be a simple country gentleman;
and from the first his circumstances and his restless mind dictated his
career, which had always something in it of the brilliant adventurer.

Another branch of the Digbies rose as the Buckinghamshire family fell. It
was a John Digby, afterwards Earl of Bristol, who carried the news of the
conspirators' design on the Princess Elizabeth. King James's gratitude was
a ladder of promotion, which would have been firmer had not this Protestant
Digby incurred the dislike of the royal favourite Buckingham. But in 1617
Sir John was English ambassador in Madrid; and it may have been to get the
boy away from the influence of his mother and her Catholic friends that
this kinsman, always well disposed towards him, and anxious for his
advancement, took him off to Spain when he was fourteen, and kept him there
for a year. Nor was his mother's influence unmeddled with otherwise. During
some of the years of his minority at least, Laud, then Dean of Gloucester,
was his tutor. Tossed to and fro between the rival faiths, he seems to have
regarded them both impartially, or indifferently, with an occasional
adherence to the one that for the moment had the better exponent.

His education was that of a dilettante. A year in Spain, in Court and
diplomatic circles, was followed by a year at Oxford, where Thomas Allen,
the mathematician and occultist, looked after his studies. Allen "quickly
discerned the natural strength of his faculties, and that spirit of
penetration which is so seldom met with in persons of his age." He felt he
had under his care a young Pico di Mirandola. It may have been now he made
his boyish translation of the _Pastor Fido_, and his unpublished version of
Virgil's _Eclogues_. As to the latter, the quite unimportant fact that he
made one at all I offer to future compilers of Digby biographies. Allen
till his death remained his friend and admirer, and bequeathed to him his
valuable library. The MSS. part of it Digby presented to the Bodleian. A
portion of the rest he seems to have kept; and though it is said his
English library was burnt by the