The Broad-Stone of Honour

Kenelm Digby and the Catholic Revival

By Charles A. Coulombe

The Romantic Movement brought many gifts to the British Isles: Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott; the Gothic Revival in architecture; the Eglinton Tournament; Young England; the Oxford Movement; the so-called “Merrie England” ideology; the Celtic Twilight; Neo-Jacobitism and the renewed culti of Charles I, Henry VI, and Mary Queen of Scots; the Arts and Crafts Movement; and most certainly the (Roman) Catholic Revival.

At the crossroads of most of these – and responsible for propagating many of them – was a remarkable man by the name of Kenelm Digby. Almost unknown to-day, he deserves to rank beside Newman, G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc not merely in the front row of British Catholic, but of British literature.

Born in 1800 to a wealthy, distinguished, (and in the case of his father, Church of Ireland Dean of Clonfert, clerical) Anglo-Irish family, he was a distant cousin several timed removed to the Cavalier hero of the English Civil War of the same name. His imagination was early fired by his youth in Ireland; his mother was a cousin of both the Abbe Edgeworth, who heard Louis XVI’s confession, and Maria Edgeworth, the novelist.

Wandering about the ruins and woods of his native land, reading Sir Walter Scott and Chateaubriand, it would have been strange indeed for him not to have absorbed the Romanticism of the time. A great athlete, young Kenelm was sent to Petersham school near Richmond, and in 1815 matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge. Amongst other things, he was one of the first rowers on the Cam.

At the end of his freshman year, Kenelm went on a journey through Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, and France, encountering Catholic culture for the first time (he already knew such thenprominent English Catholics as Charles – nephew of Alban – Butler and Sir Henry Englefield).

He would travel extensively on the Continent in the ensuing four years; during one of these trips he encountered the Castle of Ehrenbreitstein on the Rhine. This spectacular fortress, also lauded by Byron, Melville, and Washington Irving, would lend the English translation of its name – “Honour’s Broad-Stone” to Kenelm’s most famous book. Between Cambridge’s architecture, the castles, abbeys, and cathedrals he saw abroad, and his own Medievally-inflected imagination, his undergraduate years were filled with yearning for Knighthood and Chivalry. Kenelm and a friend went so far as to break into the chapel of King’s College (founded by Henry VI and to be famous in our time for its Lessons and Carols) to keep an overnight vigil. They made themselves lances and jousted, and on one occasion he literally rescued a damsel in distress from a would-be rapist.

In 1819, he took his BA – but being wealthy and uninclined to take up a trade, he remained in Cambridge as part of the university scene. In addition to swimming, rowing, and riding, he read voraciously in the various college libraries. The year after Kenelm graduated, he won the Norrisian Prize, annually awarded for “an essay on a subject relating to Christian Doctrine or Systematic Theology.” This being printed, it would be the first of a long line of books.

Two years later, he wrote the first version of The Broad-Stone of Honour: or Rules for the Gentlemen of England , a collection of quotations ancient and modern and his own musings on the true nature of Chivalry and its application to everyday life.

He would live in Cambridge until 1828, and he had an enormous influence on such newcomers as Alfred Tennyson – whose Idylls of the King and much else owed a good deal of their subject and some of their tone to Kenelm’s work. Little known today, as Mark Girouard’s 1981 book, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman makes clear, Kenelm’s tome would have a social influence on the Upper and Middle classes in England – and across the Anglosphere – that would endure until World War I and beyond. It had a huge influence on turning the eyes of the influential to the past – and this would have architectural results, as Kenelm’s friend and admirer Ruskin could point out. There were even political results; the aristocratic youths who formed Young England may have had a limited effect on British politics, but from their ranks emerged Disraeli.

But in 1825, Kenelm converted to Catholicism, as did two of his best friends at Cambridge – Ambrose Phillips de Lisle, who would bring the Cistercians back to England and sire a Catholic clan that continues to this day; and Frederick Spencer, who eventually became a Jesuit and a great maker of converts in his own right. There being no Catholic church in Cambridge, the three friends would ride twenty-six miles, fasting, every Sunday to Old Hall at Ware; there they would attend Communion, High Mass, and Vespers, and then ride back.

This zeal would also find an outlet in his literary work. Kenelm rewrote BroadStone of Honour, transforming it into an apologetic for Catholicism as well as Chivalry – and intimately linking the two.

He would continue to revise it through the course of his life, so that the final version has four volumes – Orlandus, named after Charlemagne’s nephew; Godefredus and Tancredus, in memory of the great Captains of the Crusade; and Morus, commemorating St Thomas More – these three being, in his estimation four of the greatest knights who ever lived.

Kenelm would write two other major multi-volume apologetics works. The first, which he began in the early 1830s, was Mores Catholici, a defence of the truths of the Catholic Faith through the actual customs of the Catholic peoples, during and after the Middle Ages.

The second, Compitum, similarly explores different “paths” in the Faith – the ways in which it has been lived by different professions and degrees of men. Taken together, they are an extraordinary library of Catholic knowledge – and now freely available to everyone via the miracle of the internet, as is Bernard Holland’s Memoir of Kenelm Henry Digby. It is high time to revive the memory of this titan of the Faith.