Among the hundreds of tombs in the Old English Cemetery in Via Verdi, Livorno (Leghorn), one holds a record: it is the oldest surviving tombstone. It belongs to Leonard Digges, a young Kentish gentleman who died in Livorno in October 1646, aged only 22. Today we can look at it closely thanks to the three-dimensional model we have made.

The 3D model of Leonard Digges’s tomb: rotate and zoom with your mouse or fingers.

The epitaph

The Latin inscription was copied in May 1776 by Tommaso Notari and published in 1793 in the Gentleman’s Magazine; it appears again in Milner-Gibson-Cullum and Macauley’s The Inscriptions in the Old British Cemetery of Leghorn (1906). Here it is, as copied in 1776:

Hic jacet Leonardus Diggius Anglo-Cantianus, inter nobiles & vetustissimas familias (ex utroque parente) oriundus, illustrissimi scilicet viri D.ni Dudlaei Diggii equitis aurati, custodis rotulorum in Angliâ, (a D.no Johanne Diggio Milite, qui coenobium Fratrum Observantium in civitate Cantuariensi circa annum MCCVII propriis sumptibus struxit, & ditavit rectâ serie descendentis); necnon Mariae filiae et cohaeredis D.ni Thomae Kempii, equitis aurati, (ex eisdem penatibus quibus eminentissimus D.nus Johannes Kempius, Archiepiscopus Cantuariensis, et Cardinalis titulo S.ti Balbini, et postea S.ti Rufini, emanavit, prognatae,) filius natu quintus, qui Juvenis optimae spei, obiter ab hoc solo transiit in coelum VII die Octobris, anno MDCXXXVI [sic] aet. XXII.

Here lies Leonard Digges of Kent, born of noble and most ancient families on both his father’s and his mother’s side: the fifth son of the most illustrious Sir Dudley Digges, knight, Master of the Rolls in England (descended in direct line from Sir John Digges, knight, who around the year 1207 built at his own expense and endowed the house of the Observant Friars in the city of Canterbury), and of Mary, daughter and co-heir of Sir Thomas Kempe, knight (sprung from the same house as the most eminent John Kempe, Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal of the title of Santa Balbina and later of Santa Rufina). A young man of the highest promise, while passing through this land he went to heaven on 7 October 1646, aged 22.

Two remarks. Notari read the year as MDCXXXVI, i.e. 1636: but in 1636 the cemetery did not yet exist, and the correct date, as given in the 1906 collection, is 1646. And the adverb obiter, “in passing”, suggests that Leonard was not a resident of Livorno but was travelling when death overtook him.

Montgomery Carmichael, in his introduction to that volume, wrote that the tomb “must have stood in solitary loneliness, a conspicuous uninclosed mark on the green sward surrounding the fortifications” until 1649, when Edward Langham was buried some hundred and fifty feet away.

Who was Leonard Digges?

According to English genealogies Leonard was baptised at Chilham Castle, Kent, on 11 December 1622; but the age of 22 given in the epitaph points rather to a birth around 1624, and as early as 1793 a reader of the Gentleman’s Magazine noted the discrepancy. He was the fifth son of Sir Dudley Digges and Mary Kempe, who had eight sons and three daughters in all. In 1637 he was admitted to Gray’s Inn in London, together with his brother Edward. He had links with the Italian circle in London: his name appears among the dedications of Giovanni Torriano’s Italian Tutor (1640). We do not know for certain what brought him to Livorno, a port where a small but active community of English merchants was then at work; the epitaph simply says he was “passing through”.

A remarkable family

Leonard belonged to one of the most interesting English families of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:

• his great-grandfather Leonard Digges (c.1520-1559), mathematician and surveyor, is regarded as one of the forerunners of the telescope;
• his grandfather Thomas Digges (1546-1595), astronomer, was one of the first to popularise Copernicus’s ideas in England;
• his uncle Leonard Digges (1588-1635), poet and translator, wrote one of the commendatory poems to Shakespeare printed in the 1623 First Folio;
• his father, Sir Dudley Digges (1583-1639), diplomat and Master of the Rolls, backed the voyages of Henry Hudson and William Baffin: Cape Digges and the Digges Islands in the Canadian Arctic are named after him;
• his brother Edward Digges (1621-1675) emigrated to Virginia, where he was governor of the colony in 1655-1656 and tried to introduce silk production.

The Digges and the birth of the cemetery

Leonard’s story is bound up with that of the cemetery itself. In his will of February 1643 the merchant Daniel Oxenbridge left a sum to the English minister in Livorno, Thomas Doubty, to buy a plot of land for the burial of the English: this is the act from which, around 1644, the Old English Cemetery was born. Among Oxenbridge’s heirs was the young Leonard Digges. Two years later that ground received him: his is the oldest tomb still preserved there.

From Leonard Digges to Anthony Lefroy

A genealogical thread also links the cemetery’s oldest tomb to another notable burial in the same place. Leonard’s sister, Anne Digges (1616-1664), married Anthony Hammond. From them descends the merchant and antiquary Anthony Lefroy (1703-1779):

• Sir Dudley Digges (1583-1639) and Mary Kempe
• → Anne Digges (1616-1664), Leonard’s sister, married Anthony Hammond
• → Phoebe Hammond (1648-1715), married Thomas Thomson
• → Phebe Thomson (1679-1761), married Thomas Lefroy
• → Anthony Lefroy (1703-1779), merchant in Livorno

Anne Digges was thus Lefroy’s maternal great-grandmother, and Leonard his great-grandmother’s brother. Born in Canterbury, Lefroy settled in Livorno around 1728; he collected statues, paintings and above all ancient coins, whose catalogue he published in 1764. He died in Livorno on 13 July 1779 and was buried the next day in the same cemetery, 133 years after his distant great-great-uncle. We do not know whether Lefroy was aware of the relationship, but it is tempting to imagine him walking among the tombs and reading the name of the Digges.

An archive in stone

Leonard Digges’s tomb shows how much the stones of a historic cemetery can tell us: not just a name and a date, but whole family networks spanning centuries and countries, from Kent to Virginia, from London to Livorno. That is why we continue to study, document and now also reproduce in 3D the tombs of the Old English Cemetery.