Many efforts were made for his release, the most efficacious by the Queen of France. It should have been the Dowager Marie de Medicis, 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 White's name, but for which Sir Kenelm is given the main credit, can hardly now be sifted. White, at all events, was not a prudent friend for an envoy to the Holy See. Digby "grew high and hectored with his holinesse, and gave him the lye. The pope said he was mad." Thus Aubrey. Henrietta Maria sent him once more on the same errand; but the Roman Curia continued to look on him as a "useless and restless man, with scanty wisdom." Before returning, however, he paid a round of visits to Italian courts, making everywhere a profound impression by his handsome person and his liveliness. He had to hasten back to England on his own business. His fortunes were desperate; and he desired to compound for his estates.