William (1661–1752), 5th Lord Digby, Matriculated (1679)

This 1715 portrait of William, 5th Lord Digby, depicts a member of the old Royalist family who navigated the transition from Stuart to Hanoverian England. The Digby family had been prominent Royalists in the Civil War, and their Catholicism created ongoing complications in the Protestant constitutional settlement that followed. William Digby's matriculation at Christ Church Oxford connects his portrait to the institutional records of the university that served as a training ground for England's governing class. The 1715 date makes this one of the very last portraits Kneller painted before his death in 1723, a record of the early Hanoverian gentry establishing their credentials with the new dynasty.

The portrait presents Lord Digby with the reserved dignity characteristic of Kneller's approach to the old aristocracy, the restrained pose and costume suggesting continuity with traditional values.