Dudley Digges (writer)
Dudley Digges (1613–1643) was an English Royalist writer and political thinker. He was born in Chilham, Kent, the third son of Sir Dudley Digges and Mary Kempe. He studied at Oxford, entering University College in 1629 and earning a BA in 1632 and an MA in 1635. He became a fellow of All Souls around 1632–1633 and was incorporated at Cambridge in 1637. He joined Gray’s Inn in 1641. In September 1642 he was part of a delegation set up to help defend Oxford against Parliament during the Civil War. He died in Oxford on 1 October 1643, of malignant camp fever (likely typhus), and was buried in the antechapel of All Souls. He left more than a thousand volumes to the college.
Anthony Wood praised him for a strong memory and natural ability, noting that he became a learned scholar, a good poet, and a linguist. Digges is remembered as a Royalist pamphleteer and political philosopher; all his important writings defended Charles I. In Oxford he contributed Royalist poems to university collections, including Musarum Oxoniensium and Solis Britannici perigaeum coronæ Carolinæ (both 1633), and Flos Britannicis versis novissimi filiola Carolæ et Mariæ (1637). A poem on the Great Frost of 1634 also survives in the Bodleian Library.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 08:42 (CET).