An Industrious Mind: The Worlds of Sir Simonds D'Ewes

By J. Sears McGee

This is the first biography of Sir Simonds D'Ewes, a member of England's Long Parliament, Puritan, historian and antiquarian who lived from 1602–1650. D'Ewes took the Puritan side against the supporters of King Charles I in the English Civil War, and his extensive journal of the Long Parliament, together with his autobiography and correspondence, offer a uniquely comprehensive view of the life of a seventeenth-century English gentleman, his opinions, thoughts and prejudices during this tumultuous time.

D'Ewes left the most extensive archive of personal papers of any individual in early modern Europe. His life and thought before the Long Parliament are carefully analyzed, so that the mind of one of the Parliamentarian opponents of King Charles I's policies can be understood more fully than that of any other Member of Parliament. Although conservative in social and political terms, D'Ewes's Puritanism prevented him from joining his Royalist younger brother Richard during the civil war that began in 1642. D'Ewes collected one of the largest private libraries of books and manuscripts in England in his era and used them to pursue historical and antiquarian research. He followed news of national and international events voraciously and conveyed his opinions of them to his friends in many hundreds of letters. McGee's biography is the first thorough exploration of the life and ideas of this extraordinary observer, offering fresh insight into this pivotal time in European history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Mar 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9780804794282

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Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2015 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McGee, J. Sears (James Sears), author

An industrious mind : the worlds of Sir Simonds D’Ewes / J. Sears McGee.

p.   cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-8546-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. D’Ewes, Simonds, Sir, 1602–1650.   2. Great Britain. Parliament—Biography.   3. Antiquarians—England—Biography.   4. Puritans—England—Biography.   5. Great Britain—Politics and government—1642–1649.   6. Great Britain—History—Early Stuarts, 1603–1649.   I. Title.

DA390.1.D5M33 2015

941.06'2092—dc23

[B]

2014034992

ISBN 978-0-8047-9428-2 (electronic)

Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10.5/13 Palatino

Frontispiece: The wall monument depicting Paul D’Ewes, his two wives, and his children that he commissioned in 1624. The contract he made with the sculptor Jan Janson is in BL Harl. MS 93, fo. 20v. The work is mounted above the door to the chancel at St. George Stowlangtoft. The children at the bottom of the sculpture include several carrying skulls to indicate that they died before the monument was made. Photo by J. Sears McGee.

AN INDUSTRIOUS MIND

The Worlds of Sir Simonds D’Ewes

J. Sears McGee

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

For MARNI MCGEE

and the memory of

MARY BETH MCGEE

(1918–2012)

Contents

List of Figures

Preface

Abbreviations

Author’s Note

Introduction: An industrious mind

1. A rationall hearer—1602–1620

Early Schooling in Dorset

London and Suffolk

St. John’s College, Cambridge

The Summons to the Middle Temple

2. The whole time & minde are filled with law—1620–1626

The Law Student

A Slow Start

The Call to the Bar

The Historian

The Discovery of Records

The D’Ewes Saga

The Earldom of Oxford

The Newshound in London

D’Ewes’s Sources for News

The Credibility and Dissemination of News

The Spanish Marriage

A New King

A Plethora of Parliaments

The Sermon Gadder

The Stowlangtoft Pulpit

The (Almost) Complete Puritan

Soteriological Debates

The Widow Ogle

The Suitor

The Failed Attempts

The Golden Valentine

Lady Elizabeth Denton

Lady Anne Clopton

3. To dippe my pen in teares not inke—1626–1631

The Complete Puritan

Assurance of Salvation

The Habsburg Threat

The Early Britons and Pelagianism

The Novellor

The 1626 Parliament and the Forced Loan

The La Rochelle Debacle

1628: Great Britain’s Strength and Weakness

The Assassination of Buckingham

The 1629 Dissolution

The Habsburg Onslaught

The Habsburg Retreat

The Antiquarian and Collector

Buying Manuscripts and Books

The History of Britain

The Young Husband

Islington

The Death of Paul D’Ewes

4. My dearest dearest—1631–1639

The Search for a Home

Deaths and Dangers

Bringing Up Richard

Peripatetic Again

Bereft Parents

The Travels of Richard

Richard’s Grand Tour

Italy, Geneva, and the Homeward Turn

The Scholarly Collector

Sir Robert Cotton’s Demise

Preserving the Library

Projects Old and New

The Last Sabbatical

5. The highest stepp of wickednes—1631–1639

The Newshound in Suffolk

The Protestant Cause

The Queen of Bohemia and the Prince Elector

Ship Money and the Prayer Book Rebellion

The Iconophobic Puritan

A Trumpet Blast against Altar-adorers

The Treatise on Idolatry

The Treatise on Persecution

The Lure of New England

6. An Iliad of miseries—1639–1640

The Sheriff of Suffolk

The Illegality of Ship Money

The (Non)-collection of Ship Money

The Anglo-Saxon Dictionary

The New Parliament

The MP Approaches His Task

A Walter Mitty?

An Industrious MP

The MP—the First Six Weeks

7. Stub vp the rootes of all our mischifes (December, 1640–July, 1642)

The MP—December, 1640–July, 1641)

Parliamentary Privileges

Taxation

The Earl of Strafford

The Assault on Episcopacy

The Bereft Husband

The MP—August 1641 to July 1642

Reform of Religion

The Incident in Scotland and Rebellion in Ireland

The Attempt on the Five Members

The Paper War

The Fiery Spirits

The Day of Humiliation

8. No end . . . but by the sword"

The Willughby Marriage

The MP Returns to the Fray

The Continuing Quest for Peace

The Death of Richard D’Ewes

More Fiery Spirits

Peace or War?

Horses, Taxes, and Oaths

A Presbyterian Church of England?

Preachers and Pulpits

The Last Years

The Numismatist

Documents, Descents, and Dictionaries

Pride’s Purge

Private Life—and Death

Epilogue

Appendixes

A. The D’Ewes Genealogy

B. The Children of Sir Edmonds D’Ewes

Notes

Index

Figures

1.1. Detail from D’Ewes Monument

2.1. St. George Stowlangtoft

2.2. Kedington Pulpit

2.3. Barnardiston Pew at Kedington

2.4. Portrait of Anne Clopton (1626)

3.1. MS of Great Brittaines Strengh and Weakenes

3.2. D’Ewes and Clopton Arms at Long Melford

4.1. The Baby Brass at Lavenham

Preface

This book offers at least a partial answer to a question I puzzled over while researching my doctoral dissertation in the late 1960s. It was based largely on the writings of clergymen published between 1620 and 1670. As I analyzed sermons and devotional treatises looking for the political implications of religious concepts, I wondered what the laity made of the enormous body of material their preachers provided. The surviving evidence for clerical opinion bulks large, while that for the laity is slender. I planned to write another book consisting of case studies of members of the Long Parliament for whom sources exist that would enable me to study the relationship between their religious views and their political behavior. I selected Simonds D’Ewes as one of my cases, having found his treatise on persecution (The Primitive Practice for Preserving Truth, 1645) in the Thomason Tracts. After completing other projects, I was on sabbatical in autumn 1999 and ready—at long last—to return to this one. I was astonished to discover that only five of the more than seventy volumes of D’Ewes’s papers had received significant scholarly attention. Although I badly underestimated the magnitude of the task I faced, I could not abandon it because I realized that, in D’Ewes’s papers, I had an opportunity to delve deeply into the mind of a devout lay Puritan who was an active MP in the Long Parliament and to write a biography that would explore the public and private concerns of an early Stuart individual at an unprecedented level of detail.

No one who has written a book of this kind can avoid incurring many debts, and the incurring of them is one of the greatest pleasures the life of a historian affords. I would not have been a historian at all had I not experienced the mentoring of Peter Laslett and John Elliott, my supervisors at Trinity College, Cambridge, during my junior year abroad in 1962–63. During my senior year at Rice University, Len Marsak and Lou Galambos reinforced my resolve to go to graduate school. At Yale, Jack Hexter and Edmund Morgan directed my research and earned my eternal gratitude for their wit, intellect, and guidance. All these men taught me to take history very seriously and myself not too seriously. They showed how doing history can be fun.

I joyously dedicate this book to the memory of my mother, Mary Beth McGee, and to my wife, Marni. My mother, an omnivorous and curious reader with an industrious and perceptive mind, encouraged my reading habits from childhood. Even after her eyesight failed, she listened as I read from the manuscript and asked thoughtful questions. I regret my inability to finish it before her death in 2012 because we would have enjoyed talking about it. Marni is a brilliant writer and editor who was the first reader of each chapter and a keen partner on what we came to call the D’Ewes trail. We visited the places in Suffolk where he and his kinfolk and friends had lived: Stowlangtoft, Lavenham, Ixworth, Bury St Edmunds, Long Melford, Kedington, Thornham, Boxted, Dalham, Preston, and elsewhere. Readers interested in viewing color photos from our jaunts and other sources will find them at http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/sears/dewes.pdf. When I returned from long, entrancing days of reading in the D’Ewes papers in the British Library, she listened with interest to the stories I had to tell. In the spring of 2001, I attended one of John Morrill’s seminars in Cambridge and told him of my then early interest in D’Ewes. He very kindly introduced me to his former student Peter Salt. Peter soon became essential to my research because he generously gave me access to the translations he had commissioned from Nigel Rub-bra of D’Ewes’s Latin correspondence with Albert Joachimi, Johannes de Laet, and others. Peter’s generosity did not end with this splendid gift. He read and commented extensively on the draft chapters as they emerged and discussed them with me many times. His contribution to whatever virtues it possesses is beyond my ability to enumerate or adequately express. Blair Worden, like Marni, encouraged my work on D’Ewes from the beginning and later read and commented on the entire manuscript. Similarly, Paul Seaver, Barbara Donagan, Chris Kyle, Daniel Woolf, George Woodward, and Ian Gentles read the entire manuscript and gave me excellent suggestions. Ian also gave me access to his copy of Anne Steele Young’s typescript of D’Ewes’s Long Parliament journal. Several long lunches in London with Stephen Roberts were invaluable for my interpretation of D’Ewes’s thinking in the 1640s, and I am most grateful to him for making available to me Don Gilbert’s translations of D’Ewes’s Latin diaries for the History of Parliament Trust. I have benefited greatly from the advice of friends who read parts of the manuscript: Tom Cogswell, David Cressy, Jordan Downs, Paul Halliday, Simon Healy, Peter Lake, Ed McFall, Jason Peacey, and David Trim. I have enjoyed helpful conversations and/or correspondence about particular questions with Ann Jensen Adams, Hilary Bernstein, Lynn Botelho, Louis Caron, David Coast, David Como, Pauline Croft, Richard Cust, Eamon Darcy, Beth Digeser, Hal Drake, Jason Eldred, Ken Fincham, Andrew Foster, Matt Growhoski, Felicity Heal, Caroline Hibbard, Lamar Hill, Derek Hirst, Ann Hughes, Arnold Hunt, Robert Ingram, Michael Kelly, Paulina Kewes, Mark Kishlansky, Fritz Levy, Anthony Milton, Robert Morstein-Marx, Carol Pal, Wilf Prest, John Reeve, Mary Robertson, David Harris Sacks, Lois Schwoerer, Malcolm Smuts, Paul Sonnino, Isaac Stephens, Diane Stowell, John Sutton, Stefania Tutino, Alison Wall, Richard Weller-Poley, and Diane Willen. My editors at Stanford University Press—Norris Pope, Stacy Wagner, and Eric Brandt—have been a pleasure to work with. Despite this cloud of witnesses, any flaws that remain are my responsibility alone.

I am grateful to the Committee on Research at the University of California for grants that supported some of my travel as well as funds for the translation of Latin material by UCSB graduate students Lauren Horn Griffin, Patrick Ludolph, Joe Figliulo-Rosswurm, Corinne Wieben, and John Scholl. Students in my graduate seminars also made stimulating suggestions, especially Tim Daniels, Lauren Horn Griffin, Wendy Hurford, Patrick Ludolph, Jessica Murphy, Nathan Perry, and Brian Thomasson. The staff of the Manuscripts Reading Room at the British Library—my home away from home in London—has always facilitated my work with courtesy and professionalism. And in Suffolk, the help Marni and I received from Ann and Ted Boyton, the key-holders to the late-fourteenth-century church of St. George Stowlangtoft, was wonderful. They live directly across The Street from the church in the tiny village and next to the alms cottages built with funds designated for the poor in the will of Simonds D’Ewes’s brother, Richard. They were pleased to help my research and during our first visit even lent us a stepladder so we could get a better photograph of the D’Ewes wall monument in the chancel. When we asked for advice about where to find a good lunch, they rightly sent us to the Pykkerell Inn on the High Street in Ixworth just two miles away. When they noticed that, in our excitement, we had forgotten to return the key to the church, Ted drove over to collect it from us at the pub.

Like many scholars, I get questions from time to time about what the questioner takes to be the onerous requirement to publish. The help I have had from people in England like the Boytons and others we met on the D’Ewes trail and from the many friends mentioned above demonstrates how what might seem a lonely quest is also a communal one. When that is added to the intellectual enjoyment I have had in teasing out the contents of Simonds D’Ewes’s industrious mind and the light those contents throw on the great issues that roiled Stuart England, it should be obvious that the obligation to publish has been for me a source of unending delight and satisfaction. My teaching has always drawn deeply from the well of my research, and I know it has made me a better teacher of undergraduates and graduate students. I hope I have done justice to my longtime companion, Simonds D’Ewes.

Santa Barbara, California—May 2014

Abbreviations

Author’s Note

Dates are old-style (Julian calendar and thus ten days earlier than Gregorian dates), but the year is taken to begin on January 1 rather than March 25 (the latter having been the usual practice in early modern England). With some of D’Ewes’s correspondents (such as his Dutch friends Albert Joachimi and Johannes de Laet), both the Julian and Gregorian dates were often supplied by the writers. In such cases, I have followed their practice when quoting from the letters and given both. The original spelling and punctuation have been retained in quotations, although occasionally it has been necessary to specify what word was intended using brackets. This means, for example, that D’Ewes’s practice of using ther to mean either there or their has been preserved, along with the omission (in nearly all cases) of apostrophes in the formation of possessives. A few anomalies nevertheless remain, partly because D’Ewes himself was not entirely consistent in his spelling, although more so than many of his correspondents (especially including his brother Richard). Also, James Hornigold, his assistant in the late 1630s and early 1640s, tended to use modern spellings of many common words (for example, their instead of D’Ewes’s ther, and therefore instead of therfore). I have also spelled names according the way that people signed their letters even when their contemporaries spelled them differently. D’Ewes’s elder sister signed her name Jone, although others addressed her as Joan, Johan, and Johanna. Her husband signed himself William Ellyott but was often identified as Elliot or Elliott. Richard Damport, the rector of Stowlangtoft, so signed his letters. But he was also called Danford by D’Ewes and others. Quotations from D’Ewes’s autobiography, correspondence, and other documents written in English also preserve the original spelling, but standard abbreviations have been expanded. Translations from Latin are in modern spelling, as are the various sources of the proceedings in the Long Parliament. Here I have adopted the practice of the editors of the Yale edition of the Proceedings of the Opening Session in the Long Parliament. For that reason, I have also modernized spelling and punctuation in quotations from Willson Coates’s Journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes [from October 12, 1641, to January 10, 1642]. I have done the same in quotations from the unpublished parts of the journal (Harley Manuscripts 163–66), but here I have cited folios using recto and verso rather than D’Ewes’s a and b. All manuscripts cited are in the British Library unless otherwise indicated.

Introduction: An Industrious Mind

Sir Simonds D’Ewes provides us with a unique, capacious, and luminous window into a much studied yet in important ways still elusive milieu. Surprisingly, it is a window through which very few have looked. He was born at Coxden in Dorset late in 1602 and died in London early in 1650. An energetic antiquarian and wealthy Puritan gentleman trained in the common law of England, he inherited ample estates in Suffolk and Dorset. This is the first book-length biography of him, and the obvious question as to why it is the first is not easy to answer. Biographies of a good many of his contemporaries in seventeenth-century England’s landed aristocracy have been written upon much more slender evidentiary foundations than the massive archive he created—a collection of books, manuscripts, letters, drafts, and papers that offers rich and novel insights into the history of early Stuart Britain and early modern Europe. Although he never traveled outside of southern England, his world was far from insular. Besides his extensive readings about the history of the world and his energetic newsgathering about contemporary events abroad, his regular correspondents included the Dutch ambassador to England, Albert Joachimi, and the Dutch polymath Johannes de Laet. In the late 1630s, his younger brother, Richard, traveled in France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Switzerland and wrote to him often about what he saw and heard. D’Ewes was an indefatigable newshound who drew upon a wide array of sources to inform himself and provide his kinfolk and friends with a steady stream of information about international conflicts, diplomacy, settlers in New England, and the Thirty Years’ War. He was one of the best informed persons in England about affairs abroad. He also followed events at the royal court in England and the parliamentary sessions at Westminster, obsessively and liberally conveying his opinions of them to his family and friends. Kevin Sharpe perceptively has written that "D’Ewes’s Autobiography is one of those historical documents so well known that it has not been properly studied—in the context of D’Ewes’s letters, associations and actions and of his purposes in writing it."¹ This book attempts to provide the work that Sharpe described.

Another vital interest for D’Ewes was British history because he intended to write a history of Britain from the earliest times up to his own. He made his first visit to the medieval records in the Tower of London in 1623 and quickly became fascinated by the documents he found there. His first sight of the two volumes of the Domesday book occurred in 1630, and he was quick to appreciate its importance and its uses. An avid purchaser and user of books and manuscripts, he modeled his collecting practices on those of his mentor, Sir Robert Cotton, and the Frenchman Jacques August de Thou (Thuanus). Despite his vigorous opposition to popes and Jesuits in particular and post-Tridentine Catholicism in general, one of his intellectual, literary, and spiritual heroes was the politique Catholic de Thou. That there were such things as good papists for D’Ewes indicates a nuance in his thinking that has often been ignored. D’Ewes’s library constitutes nearly one-twelfth of the famous Harleian manuscripts in the British Library.² His collection, which he called his paper treasury, thus became a substantial building block in the British Library’s vast collection of manuscripts.³ D’Ewes is well known to historians of the early Stuart period not only because of his autobiography (edited and published by J. O. Halliwell in 1845) but also his lengthy journal of the Long Parliament.⁴ His library also contained more than seventy volumes of his personal papers, and these include (alongside much else) a massive collection of letters written by and to him between 1620, when he left Cambridge to begin his legal studies in London, and his death in 1650. No one else who lived in this era in Europe left us a record of a life that approaches his in chronological extent, range, depth, and variety. The letters concerning public events that he exchanged with Joachimi, de Laet, Sir Martin Stuteville, and many others afford us a lengthy and detailed commentary on their world. The record contains detailed information about D’Ewes’s upbringing, his schooling, his religious and political thinking, his antiquarian and other researches, his two marriages, his children (including their illnesses and wet-nurses), and his relations with his parents, his brother, and his sisters and their husbands. Although his unpublished papers have been dipped into by numerous historians for a wide variety of purposes, no one has yet focused on the man himself. He was not a hero or a harbinger of modernity, and there are reasons to dislike him. Puritanism, after all, had many enemies in his time and is not in vogue in ours. Yet as Sharpe rightly observed, D’Ewes’s writing is perhaps most important for its demonstration of how worries about religion could lead a ‘political conservative’ to large anxieties about the state as well as the church.⁵ There are good reasons to find him an interesting and indeed a fascinating person whose life, thought, experiences, feelings, and activities illustrate both his distance from and his nearness to us.

Until his appointment as sheriff of Suffolk late in 1639, D’Ewes lived an altogether private life in Dorset, London, Cambridge, and Suffolk. In the autumn of 1640, he was elected to represent Sudbury, Suffolk, in the Parliament that began to sit on November 3. Still extricating himself from his shrievalty, he was unable to take his seat until November 19. Although a deeply conservative man in social and political terms, he resisted blandishments to join the Royalist side in the civil wars that began in 1642 and remained a Parliamentarian. Some of those appeals came from his brother, Richard, an officer in Charles I’s army, and part of the story that will be told in this book is that of brothers whose affection for each other and concern for each other’s welfare persisted despite political estrangement. Aside from Halliwell, the only writer who paid any attention to him before the twentieth century was John Bruce. In the Edinburgh Review (1846), Bruce wrote an engaging account of D’Ewes’s first appearance in the Long Parliament:

He is introduced to the Speaker by Sir Nathaniel [Barnardiston], one of the members for Suffolk, and a distinguished leader amongst the Puritans. The new member is just thirty-eight years of age—a man of formal precise demeanour; quite self-possessed and self-satisfied [who, after greeting several members from Suffolk sitting nearby, takes] out pen, ink, and paper, commences Note-taking. This action reveals that he is near-sighted, and apparently has lost the sight of one eye.⁶

Bruce’s use of the censorious term self-satisfied and his characterization of D’Ewes’s formal precise demeanour hint at his view of the Suffolk MP. The two essays that he wrote on D’Ewes contain some shrewd insights and have much of value, especially given the fact that D’Ewes’s papers were ignored before 1845. Bruce, like many writers since, combined praise for the voluminous record D’Ewes left with making fun of or otherwise disapproving of the man himself. Consider, for example, Bruce’s summary of D’Ewes’s performance in the Long Parliament:

And so he went on, day by day, constant in his attendance, always ready to talk, often talking the merest nonsense in the world, in a pompous grandiloquent way, altogether ludicrous; [and taking his notes] paper upon his knee, and ink hanging from his buttonhole, making History in a minute record of every thing that took place around him [and enabling us] . . . to know the Long Parl as thoroughly as if we had sat in it.⁷

Satirically, Bruce wrote that

D’Ewes was a close observer and recorder of the movements of the Speaker’s hat,—a counter of congées and reverences. He could tell to a hair’s breadth the very place to which every stranger should be admitted into the House, according to his [social] degree; where the mace should be found at any given moment of time; who might be covered and who not; who should sit in a chair with arms, and who in one without arms; and who should stand and who should kneel, and what is the symbolical difference between a black rod and a white one.⁸

Despite the amusement it provided Bruce, the fact is that in early modern England a man never wore a hat in the presence of a social superior and observance of the etiquette of the covering of heads was a serious matter. The fierce persecution of Quakers for their refusal to perform what they sneered at as hat honor later in the century must be recalled. What for Bruce was a risible punctiliousness was an unquestioned social norm for members of the landed aristocracy. Accounts of the trial of the earl of Strafford by both Edward Hyde, later earl of Clarendon, and Bulstrode Whitelocke discussed the procedural matter of hat wearing by MPs and peers. When the trial opened on March 22, 1641, Sir Thomas Peyton and D’Ewes were eyewitnesses that day. Peyton’s journal entry mentions that the the House of Commons (being but a committee) was uncovered (that is, hatless). D’Ewes’s entry for the day says nothing about hats or their absence.⁹ The placement of the mace was important because when it was not atop the table, the House of Commons was operating under committee rules, not House rules. In the former mode, known as a Committee of the Whole House, an MP could speak whenever the chairman recognized him; in the latter, he could speak only once on a bill in a particular session. Readings of bills and votes on them could occur only when the House was not in committee mode. What Bruce did not know was that the politics of the Stuart era cannot be understood if we ignore the procedures used in the House of Lords and the House of Commons and the subtle but complex social attitudes that underlay them and shaped them.

Bruce obviously found it paradoxical that a man so obsessed by what he considered trivia nevertheless created a record of such great importance. Bruce clearly found D’Ewes himself preposterous: D’Ewes’s demands upon the homage and patience of the House were excessive; and his appetite for adulation, ever craving and insatiable, increased by what it fed upon. He became a glutton, a very horse-leech, in his importunity for highly seasoned compliments to his erudition, and humble submission to the authority of his records.¹⁰ In his other essay, Bruce displayed his skepticism about the conviction held by both Simonds and his father Paul that their family was descended from the aristocracy of Gelderland. He argued that Simonds’s ruling passion was pride of ancestry and his strongest feeling, a longing to take rank among the old territorial gentry. For a man of such tastes his own pedigree was most annoying. He therefore, Bruce continued, asserted that his immigrant forebear Adrian D’Ewes during Henry VIII’s reign was a lord in disguise; and his ancestral stock one of great eminence in their native Guelderland and that Adrian came to England, not as a poor emigrant, but as a political exile; and that, on the restoration of peace, he intended to return and demand the restitution of his lands and powers. By perpetual reiteration, for it is a string upon which he was constantly harping, D’Ewes himself and his father probably came to believe this pretty tale. Bruce was unconvinced.¹¹ He decided that D’Ewes’s greatest grief derived from the way that his noble stock had been forced by poverty . . . to hide their beams behind shop-counters, and carry on the humbler occupations of life, as if the D’Eweses had been no better than other men.¹² I will argue below that this assessment of D’Ewes is more caricature than fact and that D’Ewes’s ruling passion was not his social rank but his devotion to what he believed was true religion.

Although Bruce set out to awaken interest in the extraordinary richness of the D’Ewes archive, his two articles set the tone for much that has followed and influenced the sardonic stance on D’Ewes taken by a series of historians. Consider, for example, John Cannon’s statement that D’Ewes was a vociferous Presbyterian and a self-important snob who left published papers and historical works of great value.¹³ When John Pym proposed an ordinance for a 20 percent tax on the income of landed men who had failed to give money to the parliamentary cause, Jack Hexter opined that D’Ewes’s opposition came from his slightly dyspeptic conservatism.¹⁴ Thinking of the numerous occasions on which D’Ewes predicted a woeful outcome of a proposal he disliked, Conrad Russell introduced an entry into his index under D’Ewes’s name headed simply Greek chorus.¹⁵ Many historians who have drawn upon the sources D’Ewes left us simply found him an unpleasant and difficult man. Like Bruce, Cannon obviously disliked D’Ewes while recognizing the importance of his documentary legacy. This schizoid perception has long persisted. Historians, although unable to resist sneering at his social pretensions, his limited sense of humor, and his thoroughgoing Puritanism, have found many valuable details in D’Ewes’s autobiography and used it to throw light on such topics as Cambridge life in the Jacobean era and the domestic side of the Puritan movement. They have also heavily mined his journal because it is the fullest source we have for what went on inside the Long Parliament. I will stipulate at the outset that at times D’Ewes deserved criticism for his pride, priggishness, pedantry, prolixity, and political ineptitude. Thin-skinned, opinionated, austere, and severe he indubitably was, and his enemies found him an all too easy target. I believe, however, that Simonds D’Ewes is worth considerably more attention than he has so far received for four reasons.

First, and except for the autobiography and the parliamentary journal, historians have for the most part ignored the huge collection of D’Ewes’s papers that has survived in good condition. Admittedly, his handwriting is a challenge, especially when one is trying to decipher the drafts of letters that he scribbled for his assistant to turn into fair copies for dispatch, or the sermon notes that he assumed only he would revisit. In the working drafts he wrote of letters and essays of various kinds, he often scratched things out and squeezed corrected words or phrases in between lines that were already close together. A reader of his papers is always grateful when he set himself to making a fair copy because he was perfectly capable of writing legibly, as he did in his autobiography (Harleian MS 646) and a number of other items. Indeed, his fair copies tell us much about what he considered really important. On these he trimmed his pen to produce a narrow line, but continued recutting his pens when he was writing drafts. The result was heavy, thick lines that bled ink through the sheet and make for difficult reading. The autobiography and the much-used Long Parliament journal, it turns out, are merely the tip of a documentary iceberg. These two works occupy only five of more than seventy volumes of manuscript material concerning D’Ewes and his large family and numerous friends. Many of the volumes consist wholly of correspondence most of which has gone unread by historians.¹⁶ When I stumbled into them in October 1999, I could scarcely believe my good fortune.

D’Ewes’s extraordinary library was sold in 1705 by his grandson, also named Simonds. The sale only postponed his incarceration in the debtor’s prison, where he died in 1722. It was negotiated by Humphrey Wanley, an agent of Sir Robert Harley, the earl of Oxford. Parliament purchased Harley’s enormous collection from his heirs for the newly established British Museum in 1753.¹⁷ The D’Ewes library contained more than seven thousand manuscripts and an uncertain (but very large) number of printed books.¹⁸ Had the library remained in Stow Hall, the family manor house in northern Suffolk, as D’Ewes intended, it could have been damaged or spread far and wide by piecemeal sales. We might have access to only a fraction of the papers that make D’Ewes the individual whose life is more fully documented than any other individual in Britain (and perhaps even Europe as a whole) in the first half of the seventeenth century.¹⁹ In this circuitous way, the careful provision that he made in his will for scholars’ access to his library was fulfilled, although not in the way that he had hoped it would be. I estimate that D’Ewes’s personal papers contain more than fourteen hundred letters, as well as a huge number of sheets covered with the results of his antiquarian and historical researches, drafts of parts of essays and books he intended to write (but in most cases never completed), sermon notes, lists, juvenilia, school notebooks, diaries, and accounts. A single volume, Harley MS 379, for example, holds 114 letters that contain over 41,000 words, written between 1615 and 1643. In many cases, both sides of the correspondence are available because D’Ewes kept the letters he received and drafts of many of the letters he wrote in response. The mountain of material is so high that one wonders if he ever slept more than four hours a night.

Another barrier to the use of his papers is the fact that the contents of many of the volumes that contain them are not itemized in the Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts. Harley MS 593, for example, is a large folio containing 227 sheets, but the eighteenth-century cataloger made no attempt to list its contents. He described it as "a book in fol. containing a Rhapsody of indigested Notes, collected or written by Sir Simonds D’Ewes."²⁰ But it contains numerous important insights into D’Ewes’s thinking. Harley MS 379 is labeled Letters of Simonds D’Ewes, and no information whatsoever about the writers of the letters, their dates, or their contents appears in the catalogue. Folios are itemized only in those volumes that contained what was defined as public or state matters. Other volumes were given titles such as D’Ewes Family Letters, and such private material goes undescribed. Many of these letters do, however, contain extensive statements about the religious and political issues that dominated the era. A sizable proportion of the letters and other papers therefore do not appear in either the Harleian or the British Library indices. This was what John Stoye had in mind when he referred to the trackless wilderness of Sir Simonds D’Ewes’s correspondence.²¹ They are, in effect, invisible unless one reads the private folios one by one and creates lists of the contents. In 1999, volume 379 happened to be the first one I opened. After just a few days of fascinating reading, I began to realize the magnitude of the task I was facing. But I found that I could not stop, because the varied ways in which D’Ewes’s entire life appeared slowly but steadily before me was too tempting to ignore. I was seeing people, events, ideas, and conflicts that I had read and taught and written about for more than thirty years through an entirely new and distinctive lens.

Second, D’Ewes was a man with wide interests and many friends who spent much of his time in or near London. The fact that he clearly had many devoted kinfolk and friends mitigates his reputation as a disagreeable, arrogant prig. He held no public office before 1639. Had he been a hermit uninterested and uninvolved in the world around him, there would be little reason to write his biography, regardless of the quantity of his papers. He was, however, the opposite of a recluse. He was a keen observer of his surroundings, and he copiously recorded what he saw, heard, and thought about everything. He witnessed important royal ceremonies, such as the investiture of Prince Charles as prince of Wales in 1616, the first appearance of Queen Henrietta Maria at court in 1625, and the (supposedly private) coronation of Charles I as king in 1626. Because the Inns of Court where he studied the common law from 1620 to 1626 were filled with talkative men who spent much time in the company of courtiers, ambassadors, clergymen, and officials, he had only to keep his ears open to be very well informed. Those hostile to Puritans denounced them for having itching ears for theological novelties, and D’Ewes’s ears certainly itched for news and even gossip. For example, when James I died, he gathered information about the late king’s autopsy. Although his heart was in good condition and his liver fresh as a yonge mans . . . one of his kydnyes very good but the other shrunke soo little as they could hardly find yt.²² An August 1638 letter to his brother, Richard, reported that Suffolk’s former sheriff, Sir Anthony Wingfield, had died of a spotted feaver, leaving five young children and a large debt. Simonds speculated that ther was excessiue drinking at his late summer Assizes, which perhaps sett his bloud on fire.²³ D’Ewes listened to Sir William Harvey’s lectures on anatomy and George Herbert’s on rhetoric. He frequently visited the famous library that Sir Robert Cotton was building at Westminster, worked closely with Cotton, and learned much about collecting books and manuscripts that applied to his own collection. He heard John Donne and many other eminent divines preach. He watched George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, in the company of the two kings who made him their favorite. He cultivated an extensive set of friends and contacts in England and beyond it, and with them he avidly exchanged news of public events. Even if he had not written an autobiography or kept a parliamentary journal, his papers provide an extraordinarily rich body of information about one well connected person’s consumption of the rapidly expanding body of news in early Stuart England.

Horrified by the military losses of the anti-Habsburg states in the early phases of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), D’Ewes kept close tabs on troop movements, battles, and diplomacy while the titanic struggle proceeded. Like many devout English Protestants, he feared that Habsburg victory on the Continent would be followed by an invasion of England and the forcible reestablishment of Roman Catholicism. Through his letters and other papers, we can learn much about how news was collected, analyzed, consumed, and disputed. One great advantage that D’Ewes enjoyed was his intimate friendship with Sir Albert Joachimi, the ambassador of the United Provinces to England. From soon after their meeting in 1626 until 1640, they exchanged long letters more or less fortnightly in Latin. His other long-standing correspondents included his father’s friend Sir Martin Stuteville of Dalham, Suffolk, and Johannes de Laet of Leiden, a scholar and a director of the Dutch West Indies Company as well as its historian. Newshound though he undoubtedly was, D’Ewes had other strings to his bow. He was an historian, antiquarian, genealogist, and numismatist, and his papers contain his notes on many projects alongside many letters to and from friends concerning them. There is even a warrant from Charles I himself in 1647 instructing his librarian at St. James to give D’Ewes free access to the royal coin collection and to provide a valuation of it. His Journals of all the Parliaments of Queen Elizabeth were edited by his nephew Paul Bowes and published in 1682. D’Ewes intended to write a history of England from the earliest times through the Norman Conquest of 1066, and his discoveries in the documents he studied in the Tower of London and other repositories shaped his religious and political outlook. He is often described as an antiquarian, which is fair enough so long as we remember Noah Millstone’s dictum that in the early Stuart era, ‘antiquarian’ had not yet acquired its secondary meaning as ‘trivial.’ The entire premise of antiquarian work was applying the past to the present.²⁴ D’Ewes was deeply engaged in the great conflict that culminated in the British civil wars in the 1640s, and his antiquarian research informed his understanding of that conflict and its place in the wider battles between true and false religion and just and tyrannical rulership. To discover such a rich archive and find so much of it barely touched was astonishing. To track this man’s thoughts for his entire adult life was an opportunity that I could not resist.

Third, existing biographies for individuals who lived during this era tend to emphasize either private or public lives but rarely both, because the sources usually consist of one kind or the other. D’Ewes was part of a large family, and there are letters he wrote to and received from his kinfolk. These family members also figure frequently in his autobiography because he wrote it not for publication but for the use of successive generations of his family. I will offer reasons for thinking that he began drafting it in 1636 because he was having a debate with himself—but a debate that might have important consequences for his family—about whether to move to Massachusetts. An intimate picture emerges of his feelings about his choleric, difficult, and yet loving father and his saintly mother whose death when he was sixteen devastated him. His writings carefully trace his frustrating efforts to find a bride and tell the complicated story of his courtship with his first wife, Anne Clopton. The agonies they experienced when eight of their ten children fell ill and died are fully portrayed. When he married Anne in 1626, she was just thirteen and a half. She was sole heiress to her father’s estate and from an ancient landed family whose genealogy he researched thoroughly. It is difficult to tell whether her beauty, her piety, her money, or her lineage appealed to him most at the outset, but the union soon became a love match for them both. An orphan, Anne was the ward of her formidable grandmother, Dame Ann Barnardiston, who extracted a promise from Simonds not to have marital relations with her until she was older (a promise he kept for eight months after their wedding). In 1641 (after nine pregnancies), she contracted smallpox, and he obtained leave from the House of Commons and went to her in Suffolk. When everyone there believed that her crisis had passed and she would live, he returned to London. Her death soon after brought him near to madness in his terrible grief. He even constructed a questionnaire about precisely what had occurred hour by hour in the last days of her life that he required his steward to fill in after interrogating the servants. Four of Simonds’s sisters reached adulthood and married, and his correspondence with them and their husbands provides many insights into sibling relationships. When his father, Paul, died in 1631, Simonds had to supervise the upbringing of his brother, Richard, who was still a schoolboy. Their extensive correspondence during Richard’s travels on the Continent from 1637 to 1641 makes fascinating reading, especially in the context of the opposed political paths they would soon find themselves taking. Since the D’Ewes archive contains both public and private materials in abundance, the story of Simonds’s public and private worlds can be told in a thoroughly rounded way.

Fourth, Simonds D’Ewes was a Puritan in an era during which Puritanism was an enormously powerful force politically, religiously, and culturally. The religious dimension is utterly central to D’Ewes’s story. He read widely and deeply in the history of Christianity, especially in Britain, and placed his thinking about the religious and political discord that dominated his own fraught times in a contested but plausible wider context, one shared by many of his contemporaries and fellow members of the Long Parliament. He was every inch a Puritan, and although we have many studies of Puritan preachers, the sources for writing about lay Puritans are minuscule compared with the thousands of published sermons and theological and devotional treatises produced by churchmen. Much of what scholars have written about religion in early modern England has been based heavily on these works, and this should cause no surprise. Clergymen were trained, professional theologians whose calling it was to preach what they believed was true Christian doctrine and to defend it in print with the products of their pens. My first book appeared in 1976, and about 90 percent of the sources for it were written by churchmen.²⁵ Yet I wondered about what the lay consumers made of the tidal wave of sermons that flowed from the presses and about what they heard while sitting in their pews. What happened to the theology offered from the pulpit as it passed through the prism of lay experience, attitudes, and assumptions? When Puritans such as D’Ewes, Oliver Cromwell, and many others spoke and voted in the Long Parliament, what role did their religious convictions play in the decisions they made?²⁶ It is easy to ask such questions but difficult to find sources that contain answers to them. The relative paucity of lay sources makes it the more surprising that there is no thorough analysis of D’Ewes’s religious outlook in print. Numerous valuable important studies of individual Puritan MPs have been published, but none of them even begin to rely on primary sources as extensive as those in the D’Ewes archive.²⁷ John Morrill has rightly drawn attention to what he calls the militancy of Puritanism in 1642 as a product of the build-up of tension, or internalized anger, among the godly in the years before 1642. He describes it as "the coiled spring effect that gained its urgency from the sense that the Protestant cause was being betrayed" in the late 1630s.²⁸ D’Ewes not only perfectly exemplifies this effect, but also allows us to see how it grew over time in the mind of a particular individual in intellectual and experiential terms.

This study of Simonds D’Ewes contributes to the exploration of lay religiosity in its highly politicized context in early Stuart England. D’Ewes inherited his commitment to what he called true religion (that is, high Calvinism) from his parents, and he built his own spirituality upon the foundation they had provided. Thanks to his abundant papers, we can observe at close quarters the making of a staunch lay Puritan and his development over a lifetime. The record shows that he did not spring, Minerva-like, into the world as a polished, finished Puritan. His spiritual odyssey was long and complex, and it had some idiosyncratic features. One important early step, which he related in his autobiography, occurred in his fourteenth year. From his schoolmaster in London, Mr. Henry Reynolds, he learned that merely hearing sermons was not enough. Reynolds impressed upon him the need to take notes in writing at sermons, and as he did so he became, as he put it, a rationall hearer of God’s word for the first time. Before this advance, he concluded that he differed little from the brute creatures that were at church with mee, neuer regarding or obseruing anye parte of diuine seruice.²⁹

Characteristically, upon achieving each step forward, D’Ewes disparaged much of what he had done before. His additional steps will be identified in subsequent chapters, but one must be mentioned here. The historical researches that he began in London in 1623 came to include by 1626 (if not sooner), the study of the early history of Christianity in Britain. From his reading of Gildas, Nennius, and other medieval writers, he discovered a narrative of the history of Christendom itself which could be mapped on to his own experience of the anti-Calvinism that was—to his horror—gaining adherents in England during the 1620s. He became convinced that true religion in his sense had been practiced among the Anglo-Saxons in England and Wales after their conquest of the Romans. This religion, like the Reformed Christianity that had blossomed under Edward VI, Elizabeth I, and James VI and I, had been sound and orthodox in both its soteriology and its liturgy. This meant that it had upheld the doctrine of salvation by faith alone and practiced worship that was free of idolatry and superstition. But the early British Christians had experienced the emergence of the pernicious heresy of free will in the form of Pelagianism. A Welsh monk named Morgan, who styled himself Pelagius, had introduced this heresy late in the fourth century, and it had gone on to infect much of Christendom. For a time in the middle of the fifth century in Britain, the Pelagian heresy had been stymied by the godly bishops who led what D’Ewes called the Church Christian Orthodox and truly Catholike.³⁰ By the end of the sixth century, however, the advocates of this heresy reasserted themselves with the arrival of St. Augustine of Canterbury, who was sent to Britain by Pope Gregory I. In a February 1627 letter to a close friend, D’Ewes summarized his understanding of religious developments in the Anglo-Saxon period after the initial suppression of Pelagianism. Although, he wrote, Britain and Wales had enioied the same true & pure religion wee now doe until Pope Gregory I’s emissary, Augustine, arrived in England and first conuerted the Pagan Saxons & then peruerted the Brittains true religion. He then compared this picture with the one he saw around him in his own era and argued that Pelagianism had returned in the form of the theology of brainsicke Arminius.³¹

For Puritans such as D’Ewes, Charles I’s patronage of the Laudian or Arminian party of theologians in the Church of England represented a resurgence of the heretical free-will soteriology of Pelagius accompanied by an equally abhorrent revival of popish ceremonialism that was both idolatrous and superstitious. When, in 1637, William Laud stated in a famous speech given in the Court of Star Chamber that the greatest place of God’s residence upon earth was the altar, not the pulpit, D’Ewes was aghast. He wrote that the statement confirmed Laud’s allowance and practice of the adoring or bowing to and towards the altar . . . which made mee euen tremble when I read it.³² While Laud, made bishop of London in 1628 and archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, inserted his allies into bishoprics, headships of Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and other offices in the Church of England, D’Ewes and men like him faced difficult choices. Some immigrated to New England, and he was one of many who thought seriously about following them. It looked to him as though he might have to choose between persecution for conscience’s sake in England or flight to America. Stowlangtoft lay in the bishopric of Norwich, and in 1636 the new bishop of Norwich, Matthew Wren, introduced into his diocese what D’Ewes called manie new & strange articles not required by Elizabeth I and her bishops. He singled out those concerning altars as particularly offensive.³³ Wren’s moves to enforce his visitation articles included confronting recalcitrant individuals on their own turf, and one such individual was D’Ewes. His bitter confrontation when Wren and one of his chaplains came to Stowlangtoft in October 1636 is described in detail in Chapter 5. They threatened him with punishment if he persisted in his resistance to the Laudian program. From the visiting clerics’ point of view, D’Ewes and his ilk held dangerously radical religious sympathies. For his part, D’Ewes deeply resented any suggestion that his religious views were in any sense heterodox or novel and charged instead that the Laudians had begun in 1630 to to increase the multitude & burthen of the ceremonies & intermixtures in the church, that soe they might oppress the consciences, or ruine the estates of manie godly Christians, falselie by them nick-named Puritans, although free from all schismaticall and idle opinions.³⁴ It must be stressed that D’Ewes was never an enemy to church government by bishops in principle. He counted bishops among his friends and greatly admired many of them. What infuriated him was that the godly bishops were being replaced by the impious ones, and if the process could have been reversed, he might have remained loyal to episcopacy. He did not become its opponent until he concluded it was past rescue.

When D’Ewes sought election to the Long Parliament, he did so in the fierce conviction that the impious bishops had to be brought down and the Church of England restored to the doctrine it had held and the worship it had practiced during his parents’ lifetime, his own youth, and among the ancient Britons. On the very eve of his departure for service as MP for Sudbury, he wrote to a Cambridge friend and said that he fully expected to face the hatred of the impious bishops and the whole crowd of the heterodox when he exposed their ikon slavery and impious opinions against the grace of God, and their tyrannical rule, . . . my conscience forcing me on.³⁵ In social and constitutional terms D’Ewes was conservative, and his conscience drove him to fight not for a new Church of England but for its restoration to the purity he believed it had enjoyed in earlier times. In both church and state, he believed himself a defender of precedent. He embodied one of the varieties of religious zeal that mightily strengthened the Parliamentarian party in the early 1640s, however disenchanted he became with the direction of events later on. His religious beliefs had profound political consequences, and by understanding these beliefs—in the holding of which he was very far from alone—the causation and course of the civil wars in Britain can be more firmly grasped.

This book has a straightforward chronological structure. Chapter 1 (1602–20) describes D’Ewes’s birth, childhood, and education. Chapter 2 (1620–26) concerns the years of his study of the common law of England at the Middle Temple in London. I here introduce five subsections, each treating an important aspect of his activities: legal study, historical/antiquarian research, news and politics, spirituality, and private life. D’Ewes was called to the bar in 1623 and appeared headed for a legal career. He followed the course of the parliaments of the 1620s with intense interest. Historians who have relied only on his autobiography will be surprised to learn that a diary he kept from 1622 to 1624 and letters written during the final years of James I’s reign show him to have been a severe critic of James and an admirer of Prince Charles. The autobiography, written in 1636–38, tells a different story. Chapter 3 (1626–31) drops the law but retains the other four categories listed above. They recur in the remaining chapters because they were important to him for the rest of his life. It treats the early years of his marriage to Anne Clopton, a marriage that freed him from the need to practice law. Instead, he devoted much of his time to enhancing his library and pursuing his varied scholarly projects from 1626 until his father, Paul, died in 1631. But he kept up his close observation of foreign and domestic political and religious news and continued, again unlike what the autobiography of a decade later suggests, to have had high hopes for the young King Charles. Simonds attributed the failure of the 1628 Parliament to the Machiavellian maneuvers of men he called the fiery spirits. Readers of his Long Parliament journals rightly think of the fiery spirits as the radicals of 1640 and thereafter, but it turns out that in 1628–29 he had in mind such anti-Calvinists as bishops Neile and Laud.

By the time of Paul D’Ewes’s final illness early in 1631, Simonds and his young bride must have been looking forward to an enjoyable dominion over Stow Hall. Chapters 4 and 5 describe their lives from 1631 to 1639, a period in which he remained a private person and took pleasure in building up his library and stocking his mind with its contents. But bitter quarrels with Richard Damport, the rector of St. George Stowlangtoft, led them to periods of residence in Bury St Edmunds and Lavenham to escape Damport’s hostility. These alternated with truces during which they returned to Stow Hall but lived fearing that the truce with the rector would break down. Yet the biggest threats they faced in the 1630s were in part domestic (the death of one tiny child after another) and in part public (the advance of Laudianism in England and the perilous state of the Protestant cause internationally). Chapter 6 (1639–40) begins a survey of the only period in Simonds D’Ewes’s life during which he held public office. In November 1639, the king appointed him sheriff of Suffolk. A year later he was elected to what became the Long Parliament, and the chapter concludes with his initial weeks as an MP. Chapter 7 continues the examination of his work as an MP through July 1642 and the devastating death of his first wife in July 1641.

Chapter 8 describes his continuing activity at Westminster, his second marriage, in