In the comments to a post at AVI's that began with an interesting character, I noted that pirates were pretty common among the English gentry of the era: "The English Civil War and its echoes also turned many adventurers into outlaws on Britain's wide frontier."
That turns out to be exactly what happened in this case. A Roman Catholic who converted to Anglicanism for political reasons under Charles I, he returned to Catholicism during his grief over the death of his wife. A successful privateer defending England's interests before the Civil War, he ended up in exile during the war; fought and won a duel against a French nobleman; became an emissary to the Pope for Oliver Cromwell; and after the Restoration, a popular figure at Charles II's court. He also developed a better wine-bottle than had existed before his time, stronger and tinted to protect the wine from the effects of sunlight.
One of his most famous philosophical/medical attempts was the powder of sympathy. As noted in the post I wrote about "Empathy vs. Sympathy," this was the original use of the term sympathy in English: sympathetic magic, we would call it today.
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