Others whom the present-day Orders claim to have been early Rosicrucians, annd who were certainly associated with the ideas of the movement, include the mystic Thomas Vaughan (1621-65); the astrologer William Lilly (1602-81); Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-65), as much a chemist as an alchemist; and the historian Elias Ashmole (1617-92), founder of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and a founding fellow of the Royal Society, which held to some of the Rosicrucian ideals and is said to have been a realization of the concept of the Invisible College of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood.
– A Brief History of Secret Societies: An Unbiased History of Our Desire for Secret Knowledge (1997), p. 95