An Industrious Mind: The Worlds of Sir Simonds D’Ewes by J. Sears McGee (review)

J. Sears McGee’s new work is a substantial biography of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (1602–1650), an early seventeenth-century gentleman, barrister, puritan, newshound, and antiquarian. D’Ewes is best known as one of the main sources for the political debates of the first years of the Long Parliament. The work is narrative in structure, following the often tragic twists of D’Ewes’s upbringing and his unresolved conflicts with his penny-pinching father. The work continues through D’Ewes’s education at Cambridge and the Middle Temple, his two marriages and his voracious appetite for both antiquarian knowledge and current news. Finally, we are given a view of his struggles in the Long Parliament against those he named the “violenti,” the group that morphed from the “junto” of the 1640–41, to the “war party” of 1642–44 and the “political independents” of 1645–49.

McGee has done scholars a great service in reading and summarizing D’Ewes’s seemingly endless literary output. McGee’s work ably negotiates the cumbersome primary material and opens a window into the often stark contrast between D’Ewes’s immediate opinions of events, often written in cipher for his own protection, and the later sanitized transcript provided in his autobiography. McGee’s reading shows a man who often changed his mind and who read things in the light of the political and religious filters of both the moment and with the later benefit of hindsight.

Calvinistic religion was a constant feature of D’Ewes’s life, and religion provides a dominant theme for McGee’s study. Taking up many themes worked through in his 1976 study The Godly Man in Stuart England, McGee ably explores the piety and thought of this lay puritan. Like his contemporary Nehemiah Wallington (the subject of a 1985 biography by Paul Seaver), D’Ewes came to see the workings of God’s eternal decree in the events of his life. The near misses common to a seventeenth-century subject’s life, in D’Ewes’s case nearly drowning in a dung heap or receiving a near fatal blow to the head from a bell ringing accident, were interpreted as divine mercies confirming God’s election. Tragedies, of which there were many, particularly the death of children and his first wife, were set as touchstones by D’Ewes in developing his personal salvation narrative. To further his spiritual progress D’Ewes sought out the best sermons from the most learned preachers, often berating lazy and unlearned ministers for their disservice to the body of Christ. Like Nehemiah Wallington, the 1630s were seen as a time when the true Church was under threat from Arminian and “Popish” elements linked to the royal administration. Unlike Wallington, who developed a deep respect for the clergy’s office and authority, D’Ewes was an anti-clericalist who would deny that the Church could hold a jurisdiction independent from the state, a viewpoint termed “Erastian” from 1645.

Freed from the need to earn a living by marriage and inheritance, the other major part of D’Ewes’s life was legal and antiquarian scholarship. D’Ewes is often characterized as a pedantic bore by historians, but McGee tells of how D’Ewes initially struggled with the common law before long study opened up its satisfying intellectual elegance. The fascination with precedent, procedure, and formality drove him to a life of scholarship in the repositories of antiquarian knowledge such as the Tower of London or the collection of Sir Robert Cotton. It also fuelled his unending appetite for foreign and domestic news and thus can be seen as a case study in the “news revolution” recently explored by scholars such as Joad Raymond and Jason Peacey.

McGee’s characterization of D’Ewes’s parliamentary career, while well known to political historians, provides a compressed account of the dynamics of parliamentary faction. The internal struggles of the...