Philip Chesney Yorke

“ About this time Digby professed himself a Protestant, but by October 1635, while in France, he had already returned to the Roman Catholic faith. [3] In a letter dated the 27th of March 1636 Laud remonstrates with him, but assures him of the continuance of his friendship. [4] In 1638 he published A Conference with a Lady about choice of a Religion, in which he argues that the Roman Church, possessing alone the qualifications of universality, unity of doctrine and uninterrupted apostolic succession, is the only true church, and that the intrusion of error into it is impossible. ”

“ Evelyn, who visited him in Paris in 1651, describes him as an “errant mountebank.” Henry Stubbes characterizes him as “the very Pliny of our age for lying,” and Lady Fanshawe refers to the same “infirmity.” [7] His famous “powder of sympathy,” which seems to have been only powder of “vitriol,” healed without any contact, by being merely applied to a rag or bandage taken from the wound, and Digby records a miraculous cure by this means in a lecture given by him at Montpellier on this subject in 1658, published in French and English the same year, in German in 1660 and in Dutch in 1663 ”

“ The same subject is treated in letters to George Digby, afterwards 2nd earl of Bristol, dated the 2nd of November 1638 and the 29th of November 1639, which were published in 1651, as well as in a further Discourse concerning Infallibility in Religion in 1652. Returning to England he associated himself with the queen and her Roman Catholic friends, and joined in the appeal to the English Romanists for money to support the king’s Scottish expedition. ”

“ In January 1664 he was forbidden to appear at court, the cause assigned being that he had interposed too far in favour of the 2nd earl of Bristol, disgraced by the king on account of the charge of high treason brought by him against Clarendon into the House of Lords. The rest of his life was spent in the enjoyment of literary and scientific society at his house in Covent Garden. ”