of France. It should have been the Dowager Marie de Médicis, in memory of
her hot flame for him when he was a youth; but though she may have
initiated the appeal, she died before his release, which he seems to have
owed to Anne of Austria's good services. Freedom meant banishment, but this
sentence he did not take very seriously. In these years he was continually
going and coming between France and England, now warned by Parliament, now
tolerated, now banished, again daring return, and escaping from the net. "I
can compare him to nothing but to a great fish that we catch and let go
again; but still he will come to the bait," said Selden of him in his
_Table-Talk_.

Exile in Paris provided fresh opportunity for scientific study, though his
connection with the English Catholic malcontents, and his services to the
Queen Henrietta Maria, who now made him her Chancellor, absorbed much of
his time. When the Cause needed him, the Cavalier broke away from
philosophy; and in 1645 he set out for Rome, at the bidding of the Queen,
to beg money for her schemes. With all his address, diplomacy was not among
the chief of his talents. With high personages he took a high tone.
Innocent X gave 10,000 crowns to the Cause; but they quarrelled; and the
Pope went so far as to accuse Digby of misappropriation of the money.
Digby, a man of clean hands, seems to have taken up the Queen's quarrel.
She would have nothing to do with Rinuccini's Irish expedition, which his
Holiness was supporting; and her Chancellor naturally insisted on
disbursing the funds at her commands rather than at the Pope's. Moreover,
he was now renewing his friendship with Thomas White, a heretic Catholic
priest, of several _aliases_, some of whose work had been placed on the
Index. White was a philosophic thinker of considerable power and subtlety,
and he and Digby acted and reacted on each other strongly--though Digby's
debt is perhaps the greater. Their respective parts in the _Two Treatises_
and in the _Institutionum Peripateticorum libri quinque_, published under