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 Kevin Sharpe perceptively has written that “D’Ewes’s Autobiography is one of those historical documents so well known that it has not been properly studied—in the context of D’Ewes’s letters, associations and actions and of his purposes in writing it.”1 This book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.
1. Sharpe, 691.
2. This estimate comes from T. C. Skeat, the Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum from 1961 to 1972, in his foreword to Andrew G. Watson’s volume, The Library of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (London: The Trustees of the British Museum, 1966), v. Skeat characterized D’Ewes’s “printed books” as “in no way remarkable,” but “his collection of manuscripts and charters was outstanding, and provided a rich source of historical materials on which the leading antiquaries of his day were glad to draw.” Skeat was quite right that D’Ewes’s printed books were not unusual unless we take an interest in what they tell us about what he read, thought, and valued. Watson’s thorough and careful description of D’Ewes’s library is superb and invaluable. Watson, 1.
3. Besides manuscripts and books, the collection included ancient coins and even prints. According to Malcolm Jones, D’Ewes assembled the earliest collection of prints in England that we know of, which was described as occupying “‘Three large bookes.’ A dozen or so of the many prints that once filled these volumes have descended to the British Museum’s collection.” The Print in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 27.
4. Halliwell’s service to scholarship in transcribing D’Ewes’s autobiography and publishing it is admirable, but his transcription contains numerous errors, is heavily bowdlerized, modifies spelling and punctuation, and offers almost nothing in the way of explanatory apparatus. For a long time, the only available published editions of the early parts of the D’Ewes journal were by Wallace Notestein for November 3, 1640, to March 20, 1640 (Yale University Press, 1923), and Willson Coates for October 12, 1641, to January 10, 1642 (Yale University Press, 1942). A new edition of the Proceedings in the Opening Session of the Long Parliament (House of Commons) from November 3 until September 9, 1641, has been edited by Maija Jansson and published by the Yale Center for Parliamentary History in seven volumes (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2000–7). It contains D’Ewes’s journals alongside the work of the clerks of the House of Commons and the other members whose journals have survived. Three additional volumes of The Private Journals of the Long Parliament, edited by Willson Coates, Anne Steele Young, and Vernon F. Snow, cover the period from January to September 1642 (Yale University Press, 1982, 1987, 1992).
5. Sharpe, 693.
6. Bruce, Review, 79. For the childhood injury to his eye, see p. 18 below.
7. Ibid., 84.
8. Ibid., 86.
9. POSLP 3: 6n, 4, 6.
10. Bruce, Review, 90.
11. Bruce, Journal, 331.
12. Bruce, Review, 82.
13. The Columbia Companion to British History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 234.
14. The Reign of King Pym (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941), 24.
15. Russell, FBM, 537.
16. For a small sample from the correspondence, see Halliwell, 2:159–318.
17. Watson, 54–55, 61.
18. Ibid., 62–63.
19. The unhappy fate of the papers of Sir Edward Dering, D’Ewes’s friend and a fellow antiquarian and MP, provides a good example of the way such scattering and outright losses could occur. See the list of archives now holding Dering’s papers in the ODNB, s.v. “Dering, Edward.”
20. Emphasis added.
21. English Travellers Abroad, 1604–1667 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952), 408n.
22. BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 28.
23. Ibid., MS 379, fo. 58.
24. Noah Millstone, “Evil Counsel: The Propositions to Bridle the Impertinency of Parliament and the Critique of Caroline Government in the Late 1620s,” JBS 50 (October 2011): 835.
25. The Godly Man in Stuart England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).
26. I am therefore pleased about the shift in emphasis in recent scholarship concerning religious history that Arnold Hunt characterizes as “from the clerical producer to the lay consumer.” Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 4.
27. See, for example, William S. Lamont, Marginal Prynne: 1600–1669 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963); John Morrill, “Sir William Brereton and England’s Wars of Religion,” JBS 24 (1985): 311–32; Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Richard Cust and Peter Lake, “Sir Richard Grosvenor and the Rhetoric of Magistracy,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 54 (1981).
28. The Nature of the English Revolution (London: Longman, 1993), 15.
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