What follows is a meditation upon aspects of the seventeenth century composed upon the observation of one man, the extravagant courtier Sir Kenelm Digby. He is a man who was accorded attention by his contemporaries extraordinarily disproportionate to the romantic bit roles to which history has reduced him in later accounts: something of a miles gloriosus and cuckold, yet a buccaneer in both love and war. English Roman Catholic son of a father executed for his part in the Gunpowder Plot, Digby was a supernumerary attendant to his uncle's negotiations for Charles I's marriage to the Spanish Infanta; became famous (or infamous) for his frustration of the Venetian fleet at Scanderoon; published a self-glorifying account of a duel for Charles's honor in France; was a charter member of the Royal Society; was a cherished and much-praised patron to Ben Jonson; and, finally, was the suitor, husband, and widower of Venetia née Stanley, perhaps the most gossiped about and most celebrated courtesan of the salad years of Charles's reign during the twenties until her death in 1633. It is this complex love relationship that has been the focus of later attention to Digby; sixty years ago a talented amateur chronicled it in a charming little book, and thirty years ago the Italian scholar Vittorio Gabrieli made public a series of manuscripts which were, in large part, Digby's own accounts of his marriage to Venetia and her loss to death.