Digby, Sir Kenelm

His father, a convert to the Roman Catholic Church, died when he was still a boy; and it was a Protestant uncle who took him, at age 14 and for two years, to Spain, where he began his lifelong habit of collecting medical and culinary receipes. Later, at Oxford, he studied under a famous mathematician and astrologer, and also fell in love, with a notorious beauty, Venetia Stanley. Opposing the match, his mother packed him off on on a three-year Grand Tour of France and Italy, but he married Venetia when he returned and the marriage lasted happily for eight years, until Venetia’s sudden death in 1633.