This beautiful heroine of her celebrated husband's devotion, was a very remarkable personage at her time, and is so intimately connected with Sir Kenelm, his pursuits and adventures,–strange and picturesque as they were,–that she has always excited considerable interest. Her beauty, and the admiration it created; her want of proper education, and unprotected state, exposed her to the attacks of envy and ill-nature, and her character has suffered, perhaps unmerited, censure. The history of her life is altogether a love-tale, which her husband has himself related in the inflated language of the time.

Sir Kenelm Digby was the son of the unfortunate and imprudent Sir Everard, who expiated his crime of conspiracy on the scaffold, together with others concerned in the gunpowder plot. This sad event occurred when his son was an infant of three years of age. Although his mother was a rigid Catholic, yet she submitted–probably in order to save the confiscation of his estates–to his being educated as a Protestant, waiting, doubtless, until the time should come, when, by her influence, she should induce him to embrace the belief of his forefathers–an event which duly happened.

Venetia, the “lode-star” of this eccentric genius, was one of the daughters of Sir Edward Stanley, of Tonge Castle, in Shropshire, Knight of the Bath, grandson of the Earl of Derby. She was born in 1600; her mother was Lucy, daughter and co-heiress of Thomas Percy, seventh Earl of Northumberland, and she had the misfortune to lose her when only a few months old.