hers who was my greatest worldly blessing", and he was therefore buried in the same black marble and copper tomb Venetia had been buried in three decades earlier. Following his wishes, no inscription was added to hers. Just a year later, the church fell within the area burned in the Great Fire of 1666. John Aubrey later reported seeing in a shop window the gilded bronze bust of Venetia from the top of her tomb, but "the fire had got off all the gilding". Later, he added, the bust was melted down altogether. Sir Kenelm wrote a "Private Memoir" of their courtship which is one of the major sources of information about her. It uses the pseudonyms Theagenes and Stelliana for the main characters, and Digby appears to have revised it intermittently throughout his life. These Private Memoirs were published in London in 1828, in a bowdlerised form. The cut scenes, mostly sexual in nature, were first privately circulated in a pamphlet, and eventually included as an appendix to a later printing within a year or two of the first publication. The book describes the childhood romance of "Stelliana" and "Theagenes", various obstacles throughout their adolescence, and final union in a secret marriage, after which child is secretly born in Stelliana's father's house. The book ends with Theagenes on a maritime expedition (modelled after Digby's own exploits), looking forward to his return home to his wife and sons. Yet there is no evidence to verify the document's factual basis. It is not known, for example, the exact identity of "Mardontius," the rival suitor to whom "Stelliana" was engaged during the period in which "Theagenes" was presumed dead. Aubrey attempted to identify him as Richard Sackville, 3rd Earl of Dorset, but the identification does not hold up to any historical examination. Over the centuries, the most widely disseminated information about Venetia came from John Aubrey's Brief Lives, but Aubrey’s information was hearsay. Vittorio Gabrieli, an Italian scholar, published English-language editions of both In Praise of Venetia and The Private Memoirs in Rome in the second half of the 20th century. An indirect Digby descendant, Roy Digby Thomas, produced a 1956 biography of Sir Kenelm Digby, The Gunpowder Plotter's Legacy, but it contains much now-discredited material. The Dulwich Picture Gallery's catalogue, Death, Passion, and Politics (ed. Ann Sumner), published in conjunction with their exhibition of Van Dyck's portraits of George Digby and