D’EWES, Sir Simonds (1602-50), of Stowlangtoft and Lavenham, Suff.

There can be no better documented parliamentary career in this period than that of D’Ewes, whose own record of the Long Parliament provides not only a commentary on his own public and private life but also forms the basis of so much of our understanding of how that Parliament developed. D’Ewes was elected on the strength of his own interest around Sudbury, but his family were relative newcomers to Suffolk. Indeed, D’Ewes’s paternal great-grandfather, Adrian D’Ewes, who died in 1551, only arrived in England to escape religious persecution in his native Netherlands. His great-grandson tried in vain to find a record of his ancestor’s naturalization, and concluded that he lived in England as an alien until his death. D’Ewes’s grandfather, Geerardt D’Ewes, was the first of the family to enter the Middle Temple, and his father, Paul, practised law and became a Six Clerk in chancery.28Autobiography, i. 4, 6-7, 9-11. The estate at Lavenham, eight miles from Sudbury, was bought by Paul D’Ewes in 1611, as an investment of the money the eight year-old Simonds had inherited from his maternal grandfather. On his death, Richard Simonds also left D’Ewes with a substantial estate on the Devon-Dorset border.29Copinger, Manors of Suff. i. 122; Autobiography, i. 42, 54-5. D’Ewes was well into adulthood and had already drafted his autobiography before he discovered from Sir John Strangways* that Richard Simonds and his brothers were illegitimate offspring of Sir Giles Strangways, who sat as knight of the shire for Dorset in five Parliaments between 1553 and 1559.30Autobiography, i. 21; HP Commons, 1558-1603. Paul D’Ewes augmented his estate in Suffolk in 1614 by buying Stowlangtoft manor, where he built the hall in 1625, a purchase that in his son’s mind completed the family’s break with Dorset.31Autobiography, i. 45, 65; Copinger, Manors of Suff. 366.

Scholar and lawyer

D’Ewes was educated by a number of schoolmasters, in different locations, and was admitted to the Middle Temple as a child on the request of his father, himself a second generation Templar.32McGee, Industrious Mind, 19-43, 46. When space at the inn was at a premium, the grant of chambers to the ten-year-old D’Ewes naturally bred resentment among the older students, and qualifiers had to be made to the award until he entered commons in November 1620.33MTR ii. 538, 539, 541, 546, 551, 653, 659, 660. D’Ewes nevertheless recorded how when he made his first appearance at the Middle Temple he enjoyed seniority over 200 members there.34D'Ewes, Autobiography, i. 44. Earlier in 1620 he had begun his life-long habit of keeping a diary of his public and private life, and within a year or two of this had – with visits to the records in the Tower of London and to the library of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton† – commenced on the serious antiquarian pursuits which his diarizing complemented.35McGee, Industrious Mind, 36-7, 55-6. Also by the mid-1620s D’Ewes had become both an avid consumer and disseminator of news gleaned in London, reading ‘separates’ and on occasion writing newsletters himself for his contacts and patrons.36T. Birch, Court and Times of Charles the First (2 vols. 1848), i. 79, 90, 100-1; McGee, Industrious Mind, 73. These would later include his Cambridge tutor, the Calvinist scholar, Richard Holdsworth, and Henry Bourchier, 5th earl of Bath.37Harl. 377, ff. 6v-7; Harl. 374, f. 121. Around 1630-1, D’Ewes took to visiting Cotton, who had been separated from his library through the hostile interventions of Archbishop William Laud; he could not refrain from advising Cotton, who was some 31 years his senior, to consider why God had visited him with this chastisement.38Birch, Court and Times, ii. 39.

D’Ewes’s interest in news and in chronicling public and private events was informed by a trenchant international Protestant perspective and a critical appraisal of the government of Charles I. His autobiography, composed in 1638, contains extensive reflections on developments in Europe and the military threats to the Protestant cause. He took a lively interest in matters relating to the Protestant Dutch, some of this attentiveness undoubtedly originating in his own family history. His appreciation of the religious persecution that had brought his great-grandfather to England never deserted him, and he maintained links with Gelderland, the largest of the United Provinces and the home territory of his ancestors. These ancestral loyalties and affinities helped propel D’Ewes towards an enduring friendship with the Dutch ambassador to England, Sir Albertus Joachimi, which became even stronger after the death of his father in 1631.39Autobiography, i. 295, 351, 355, 361, 369, 371, 379, 391, 401, 411, 429, 434, 436; McGee, Industrious Mind, 69. Joachimi became a regular, sometimes weekly, supplier of European news to D’Ewes.40Autobiography, i. 421. In domestic politics, both D’Ewes and his father were hostile to George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham. A few years after being called to the bar, D’Ewes wrote how he would ‘rather see the duke’s reformation than his ruin; yet rather his own than the weal public’s’.41Birch, Court and Times, i. 100. His account of the assassination of Buckingham is much more sympathetic towards the perpetrator than to the victim.42Autobiography, i. 381-88. D’Ewes father and son were themselves the object of hostility from Buckingham clients such as Sir Nicholas Hyde, chief justice of king’s bench, who in 1631 fined D’Ewes for absenting himself from the Suffolk grand jury, a punishment which D’Ewes considered wholly political and vengeful in character.43McGee, Industrious Mind, 189-90. These anti-Buckingham associations proved no obstacle to D’Ewes’s being honoured with a knighthood in 1626 and a baronetcy in 1641, however, and he was well connected at court through family links and his father’s occupation.44S.P. Salt, 'Sir Simonds D'Ewes and the levying of Ship Money, 1635-1640', HJ xxxvii. 256.

The penalty D’Ewes suffered at the impanelling of the Suffolk grand jury came close to being repeated in a brush with the commissioners for exacted fees, whose investigation of him was scotched only by the intervention of Edward Cecil†, 1st Viscount Wimbledon, a relative of his first wife’s.45Autobiography, ii. 47. Suffering as a victim of officialdom seems to have been much closer to D’Ewes’s experience than serving in local office ever was. It is striking how little local office-holding figured in D’Ewes’s pre-1640 background. This was because of his family’s shallow roots in the county; the survival of his father to 1631, which meant that before that date he was not head of his family; and the significant amount of time D’Ewes spent away from Suffolk, mostly in London. He resolved from 1629 to spend as much as half his time in the capital.46McGee, Industrious Mind, 130, 174. His lack of engagement with local office did not imply indifference to public affairs, and certainly not to parliamentary politics. Although he never practised law after being called to the bar, preferring instead to devote himself while in London to writing law reports and searching historical records, he was nevertheless well placed to acquire a parliamentary seat, and considered standing as a candidate in the elections for the 1624 Parliament. He decided against it; the thought ‘vanished to some discomfort’, he recorded.47McGee, Industrious Mind, 83, quoting Harl. 593, f. 14v. He sent full reports to his contacts on events in the 1626 Parliament.48McGee, Industrious Mind, 85-6. According to his own testimony, his decision not to practise at the bar of the common law and thus probably forgo the prospect of high political office was determined by his intense perception that the Protestant church was everywhere under threat and likely to face worse persecution.49Autobiography, i. 307. From 1629, his studies in parliamentary history were partly facilitated by Henry Elsynge, then clerk of the House of Lords, who lent him records.50Autobiography, i. 409-10. In 1641 he was to claim that he was familiar with the standing orders of the House of Commons before he was elected to it.51Procs. LP, v. 90. In 1631 he contemplated writing an apologia for the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus, an outstanding Protestant champion, but instead his focus remained on a mix of research among legal and parliamentary records, family history and, from May 1632, his collection of coins.52Autobiography, ii. 57, 71.

D’Ewes’s own Protestant piety and religious discipline, which included making notes on sermons and domestic devotions, including fasting, were established in the first half of the 1620s. He underwent some form of conversion experience in July 1624.53McGee, Industrious Mind, 94-7. He despised Arminius as a ‘flashy divine’, and was hostile to Laud, to his own bishop, Matthew Wren of Norwich, and to their ‘wicked adherents’.54Autobiography, ii. 65, 113. During the early 1630s he became friendly with Edmund Calamy, lecturer at Bury St Edmunds, who was soon to put himself under the puritan patronage and protection of Robert Rich†, 2nd earl of Warwick.55Autobiography, ii. 82. D’Ewes disapproved strongly of the ‘extreme vanity’ of the king’s court, and went out of his way to visit William Prynne* in prison, with a view to offering the victim of Laudianism some comfort on the eve of his first mutilation for offending Laud; it was the outrageous treatment of a gentleman, a scholar, a lawyer and a pious Protestant that moved D’Ewes, as it did many other observers of public affairs.56Autobiography, ii. 67, 104-5. The dynamic between public events and his own personal life, mediated through his strong belief in God’s providence, was again evident in his thinking after the loss in 1636 of his son, the fourth of his male children by this time to have died. It led to his entertaining thoughts of himself as someone who was destined to suffer for his Protestant beliefs; and also to his considering seriously the prospect of emigration to New England. More immediately and practically, it led in 1638 to his writing an autobiography.57Autobiography, ii. 49, 145; S. D'Ewes, The Primitive Practise for Preserving Truth (1645), sig. A3 (E.290.9). Having concluded that Ship Money was iniquitous and unlawful – ‘to pluck away the subjects’ goods and estates from them contrary to their ancient and hereditary liberties, by force and power, what can the issue of it be but fatal?’ – he found himself in 1639 pricked for sheriff of Suffolk and obliged to administer the unpopular imposition himself.58Autobiography, ii. 133.

The government had in fact had D’Ewes in its sights since 1636 as a likely sheriff.59Salt, 'D'Ewes and Ship Money', 263. After his appointment, he struggled to meet his tax-collecting obligations. He managed to collect only about 10 per cent of what was required on the writ of 1639, which was unexceptional among his fellow East Anglian sheriffs, but by the summer of 1640 was notable enough for him to be included in the list of sheriffs the privy council intended to prosecute in star chamber for their neglects.60Salt, 'D'Ewes and Ship Money', 264, 265. Nevertheless, at no time did he refuse to pay the levy; nor did he speak out publicly against it.61Salt, 'D'Ewes and Ship Money', 262. He probably evaded the worst effects of falling foul of the council through his access to the 4th earl of Pembroke (Philip Herbert*). This was not one of his many relationships mediated through a common interest in antiquarian pursuits, but probably through D’Ewes’s brother-in-law, Sir William Poley, a gentleman extraordinary of the privy chamber.62Salt, 'D'Ewes and Ship Money', 267, 274. Like many of the English gentry, D’Ewes held out great hopes for a Parliament in 1640. Since 1629 he had considered a Parliament to be ‘the greatest means under heaven now left for the preservation of the church and state, if it be not made abortive by fatal ill-instruments’.63Autobiography, i. 372. He was advised by one of his London correspondents to support the candidatures of Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston* and Sir Philip Parker* in the elections to the first Parliament of 1640.64Salt, 'D'Ewes and Ship Money', 272. As a serving sheriff, his own candidature would have been impossible on that occasion, but after the failure of the Short Parliament he evidently retained a belief in the value of a Parliament to pronounce on the legality of the Ship Money levies which had become so burdensome to him: ‘if a parliament come, the law will be explained’.65Salt, 'D'Ewes and Ship Money', 271. His own bitter experience as a Ship Money sheriff had taught him to reflect on the state of the country, including the ‘deadness of trade’ and what the propertied considered their threatened standard of living.66Harl. 593, f. 183. In the Short Parliament elections, D’Ewes had an easy time of it as returning officer for the county contest, but not until December 1645 did he rid himself completely of a debt owing in exchequer for his year as sheriff.67CUL, MS Ee.III.10, p. 22.

The ‘moderate spirit’ and diarist, 1640-2

D’Ewes’s own prospects as a Parliament-man were transformed in the second half of 1640. It is clear that he was keen to find a seat for himself in the second Parliament of the year, knowing, as he did, that it would assemble near or after the end of his shrieval term. He wrote flatteringly to a member of the privy council, thought to be Pembroke, in September, implying that the legality of Ship Money should be challenged.68Salt, 'D'Ewes and Ship Money', 274, 275. It was certainly Pembroke to whom he wrote on 1 October, offering some antiquarian advice to revive a title for Philip, Lord Herbert*, his heir, while hoping that the new Parliament would abolish the ‘etcetera’ oath and provide relief for those in arrears with Ship Money. D’Ewes went on to suggest himself for a seat as one of the ‘moderate spirits’ he thought would be very useful in the Commons. He declared himself to Pembroke to be moved by a ‘desire to do public service’. Explicitly, D’Ewes drafted a letter for Pembroke’s approval, which would be sent to Dorset boroughs where Pembroke’s interest prevailed, stressing the Suffolk man’s credibility as one ‘born in your western parts’.69Harl. 374, f. 157. D’Ewes’s interest with Pembroke, and his presumption, failed to produce any result; but in Suffolk he was judged to be too encumbered still by his office from standing as knight of the shire, though free to offer himself to the boroughs. He took advice on the matter.70Harl. 374, f. 160. Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston wrote to him early in October, drawing him into an arrangement by which William Cage*, D’Ewes and Barnardiston himself were part of a co-ordinated effort to ensure the return of godly candidates.71Harl. 384, f. 64. D’Ewes was successful at Sudbury, and completed the electoral documentation himself; Barnardiston managed the courtesies in the town.72Harl. 384, f. 65; D'Ewes (N), 1. For his part, however, D’Ewes was an ineffective and seemingly over-scrupulous manager of the shire election, which nearly ended in a riot. He was fortunate to avoid a referral by one of the candidates to the privileges committee, and anticipated the possibility by writing to John Pym* to establish what the procedures were in such cases.73Harl. 384, f. 66; 'Suffolk' , supra. Sudbury took D’Ewes to itself, however, and seven months after the election the townsmen were offering thanks to him for the ‘abundant pains and love’ he had thus far shown the corporation.74Harl. 383, f. 189.

Barnardiston reported to D’Ewes after the election the opinion of Lady Maynard, wife of William Maynard†, 1st Baron Maynard, that the Parliament would be over by the following July.75Harl. 384, f. 66. D’Ewes’s own participation in it was delayed by the final burdens of his work as sheriff of Suffolk, so when he first entered the House on 19 November to take the oaths it may well have been with a sense of impatience.76Procs. LP, i. 187. He certainly intended to make an impact on his first day, and recounted to his wife how he made three speeches that morning, including an intervention he himself took to be authoritative.77Harl. 379, f. 73. This was no doubt his pronouncement, based on a citation of statute, in favour of public access to records. He spoke to assist Oliver St John* in the search for precedents in attainder cases, which the government was trying to obstruct because the intended subject of the process was the 1st earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†).78Procs. LP, i. 190. This was certainly a more useful intervention than his very first, earlier that morning, on the Great Marlow disputed election. D’Ewes moved in favour of the widest possible franchise, to include ‘the poorest man’, and claimed ‘all had voices in the election of knights’.79Procs. LP, i. 187. In the first few months of his time in the Commons, the offering of precedents quickly became D’Ewes’s characteristic contribution, and may well have been a deliberate plan of self-advancement. Although he was new to the House, his knowledge not only of its history and records, but also of a sizeable core of its Members and certainly its secretariat, gave him the standing of one of much greater seniority than his own experience would warrant. He was ready with precedents for summoning the Laudian apologist John Cosin (21 Nov.), for providing the Commons with a guard (23 Nov.), for regarding tonnage and poundage as a parliamentary subsidy (27 Nov.), for treating the profanation of the sabbath as a serious offence (30 Nov.) and in favour of the wider franchise at Tewkesbury (11 Dec.).80Procs. LP, i. 227, 251, 337, 338, 373, 566. All of these were in tune with the policies of the reforming element in the House, led by the so-called ‘junto’. By July 1642, D’Ewes had convinced himself that the House had appreciated his expert advice over a period of more than a year and a half, and there is enough evidence to suggest that his interventions were generally received with respect and treated as constructive.81PJ iii. 259.

As well as being assertive in offering a historical perspective on parliamentary business during the opening months of the Parliament, D’Ewes was forward in proposing motions. The subjects of these included the best way to make use of Irish records while ensuring their preservation (20 Nov.), informing the king about the Commons’ intention to purge the northern army of Catholic officers (24 Nov.), the Warwickshire disputed election (2 Dec.), thanks to the king for a message (17 Dec.) and the exclusion of the parliamentary victims of the 1628-9 dissolution from the committee on it (18 Dec.).82Procs. LP, i. 210, 269, 420, 635, 658. D’Ewes was from the outset keen to bring Strafford and his associates to book. As well as searching for precedents for a parliamentary trial for the lord deputy of Ireland, he involved himself in committees to hear the petitions of his victims (3 Dec.) and would have liked to be on the committee for exploring the possibility of impeaching Laud for high treason; various Members named him to it, but D’Ewes records how his name was ‘omitted by the clerk’s negligence’.83Procs. LP, i. 354-5, 442, 624. To D’Ewes’s mind, however, there were strict limits to the extent to which precedent and parliamentary privilege could be over-ridden by the political emergency. On the Strafford case, he duly searched the records at the behest of the Commons, but in his report wished he ‘could furnish then with a hundred precedents: but unless we are sure we must only see what the Lords will yield unto’.84Procs. LP, i. 355-6.

His presence in the House was more expansive than his total of 13 committees up to 31 December 1640 would suggest. Three of these involved Strafford; another two were on elections, and another couple were on the prerogative courts of chivalry and high commission.85CJ ii. 31b, 38a, 39b (Strafford); 40b, 49b (elections); 34b, 44b (prerogative courts); Procs. LP, i. 293, 421-3. The topic of Ship Money was naturally of interest to him, as was coat and conduct money, another contentious non-parliamentary tax burden of the late 1630s. D’Ewes successfully moved that all former sheriffs who like him had received a summons to star chamber in connection with Ship Money should be included in the committee.86CJ ii. 45b, 50b; Procs. LP, i. 471. He was an active and committed member of the committee on the cases of William Prynne* and other victims of Charles I’s personal rule, and relished the coincidence that the committee sat in star chamber, where Prynne’s savage sentence had been handed down and where he himself might easily have been ‘split and ruined’.87Autobiography, ii. 252; Procs. LP, i. 441; ii. 36-7, 55-6, 79-80, 185-6, 251-2, 281-2, 335-6, 345-6, 697-8. Like Pym, he was out of sympathy with those proposing to grant the king subsidies; as a Ship Money sheriff who had suffered because of the difficulties of apportionment and collection, D’Ewes much preferred the potentially more efficient grant of a fixed sum to be divided rationally between counties.88Procs. LP, i. 555; Autobiography, ii. 253. He was in favour of calling the customs farmers to account, and was keen to deny the title of ‘tonnage and poundage’ to the impositions of customs from which the farmers had been profiting, holding that tonnage and poundage was appropriate only as the name of a parliamentary grant of customs.89Procs. LP, ii. 66-8. He continued to be hostile to the merchant princes who ran the customs service, in April 1641 referring to them in a letter to his wife as cheats. He prided himself on being a more vocal opponent of William Strode I’s bill for annual Parliaments than anyone else in the House.90Autobiography, ii. 256-7, 264.

D’Ewes began recording the proceedings of the Long Parliament in journal or diary form even before he himself entered the chamber as a Member. From 6 November to the 19th, the proceedings were written up privately by John Bodvell*, and D’Ewes took over writing in a volume Bodvell had started.91D'Ewes (N), 1, n.1. In February 1641 D’Ewes was joined by John Moore* as a serious note-taker. The two men sat next to each other, and by the summer of 1643 D’Ewes had come to recognise that in Moore he had ‘one of the truest friends’ in the Parliament.92Harl. 165, f. 199. The friendship became sufficiently close for D’Ewes to be entrusted with writing Moore’s will.93Harl. 165, f. 119v. The two men collaborated on their parliamentary journals.94'John Moore' infra. Moore began his, a more immediate and less crafted record than D’Ewes’s, on the day that D’Ewes first entered the House, suggesting a collaboration instigated by the Suffolk man.95Procs. LP, i. 194. In D’Ewes’s early parliamentary diarizing, down to 23 July 1642, his method was to write up his account in the chamber, doubtless exchanging notes with Moore.96PJ iii. 259. His aim was to create a record for private reflection on events and for posterity; his instincts were against publishing speeches delivered in the House, partly because of the danger of inaccurate or misleading publication, but also because his elevated view of parliamentary activity inclined him to view speeches more as arcana sacra than material for newsletters.97Procs. LP, i. 382; iii. 496; iv. 152. This perception did not, however, inhibit him from sending ‘speeches and petitions’ home to back to Stowlangtoft, for the edification of his wife; and he despatched a ‘weekly journal’ to his brother-in-law, Sir William Elyott.98Autobiography, ii. 257, 271. Nor did he scruple against publishing speeches himself, such as the one he made on 2 January 1641 to argue the seniority of Cambridge University over Oxford, justifying publication as the correction of errors in an unauthorised version.99Two Speeches (1641, E.196.24); Procs. LP, ii. 93.

By March 1642 D’Ewes had come to picture himself as the ‘principal note-taker’ in the Commons, but he had to rebut the assertion by Sir Henry Vane I, whose memory could draw upon the best part of 30 years’ Commons experience, that there was a time when no-one had taken notes in the House. Only two months after this exchange, D’Ewes had convinced himself that note-taking was ‘ancient use’.100PJ i. 512, ii. 318. The effect of the early collaboration between D’Ewes, Bodvell and Moore was undoubtedly to create similarities in style, content and method between them, in which D’Ewes nevertheless stands out as being the most egotistical. Bodvell was still keeping a diary in July 1642, though D’Ewes’s early reliance on it seems not to have persisted.101PJ iii. 158. Early 1642 marks something of a parting of the ways for D’Ewes and his fellow-scribes, at least in D’Ewes’s own perceptions. A fortnight after D’Ewes had refuted Vane’s view of diary-keeping as an innovation, he angrily distanced himself from the clerk’s lumping him together with Moore and Bodvell as note-takers who consulted the Commons Journal each evening to make up their own records. D’Ewes made it clear that by contrast with the others, he composed his account from memory.102PJ ii. 53. By then, his diary had begun to include his sometimes less than favourable views of his parliamentary colleagues, which further distinguished him from the less personal tone of his associates. An early object of his disapproval was Henry Marten, whose speech on 8 February 1642 he denounced to his pages as ‘dangerous and ignorant ... yet because I took him to be an honest man, I did avoid all bitter expressions in the refutation of him’.103PJ i. 313. But D’Ewes was always inclined to be touchy when the subject of note-taking came up; as late as July 1645 he refuted a suggestion by Edmund Prideaux I* that it was the clerk’s job to record what Members said, insisting on the effort required to maintain an accurate record, compiled ‘until head and knee weary’.104Harl. 166, f. 244.

The worsening political situation in 1642 led D’Ewes not only to use the diary as an outlet for his feelings, but at certain points when he felt overwhelmed by the intensity of the crisis to abandon writing it.105PJ iii. 158, 167. Feelings of a more personal sort lay behind his change of method in July of that year. After the House had turned on him in a put-down supported by Speaker Lenthall, D’Ewes decided henceforth not to write up his journal in the Commons, but from memory when back in his lodgings. From January 1644, the writing-up of the parliamentary journal became a regular task each morning before he came to the palace of Westminster.106PJ iii. 259; Harl. 483. By June 1643 his diary occupied ‘three great tomes’, and despite the occasional revulsion from the task that he felt because of a sense of crisis or alienation, D’Ewes started a fourth, and persisted with the parliamentary diary until November 1645; sometimes, as in July 1643, recording an event, ‘which concerns the history of the time’, that he had not in fact personally witnessed.107Harl. 165, ff. 93, 130. His motivations changed as he felt an increasing sense of detachment from, and lack of sympathy with, the direction of parliamentary policy. In June 1643 he remained keen to ‘transmit ... the story’, but also to record ‘the very secret workings and machinations of each party as well as of the two houses of Parliament chiefly led and guided by some few members of either House as of the king’s party’.108Harl. 165, f. 93. He predicted that his writings would be useful ‘because I have in them set down matters with the same freedom with which others spake or acted them’, and his frankness does indeed set him apart from the cautious or opaque records of his contemporary diarists.109Harl. 165, f. 93v. And by September 1644 at the latest, he began to revisit his diary entries, for example adding to his record for 25 August 1643 that William Fiennes, Viscount Saye and Sele was a ‘prime Independent’ and to that for 1 August 1643, when D’Ewes delivered a speech welcoming the Solemn League and Covenant, a note that in 1647 the ‘violent spirits’ were unanimously hostile to it.110Harl. 165, ff. 157v, 163v, 179.

Two other types of diary were kept by D’Ewes to complement his parliamentary journal in English. From January 1644 he kept a Latin diary, occupying two volumes. The Latin diaries help fill out our knowledge of how D’Ewes spent his days, after the start of his alienation from Parliament. They mix the main points of parliamentary business with a record of the rest of D’Ewes’s day: from his writing up of the parliamentary diary each morning through his lunchtime socializing and committee attendance in the afternoons to the evening studies of family pedigrees and his coin collection. Days often ended with pious devotions and household prayers. A third type of diary, in cipher, had its origins in D’Ewes’s schooldays. He and his fellow pupils devised a private code based on a symbol for each letter of the alphabet, which he continued to employ for the rest of his life.111Autobiography, 95-6. He used it for passages in the parliamentary diaries when he was beginning to develop a hostile critique of the junto: for example to record speeches of Pym’s as ‘full of asperity and fieriness’ (9 Apr. 1642) and containing ‘many virulent expressions touching the malignant party’ (24 May).112PJ ii. 148, 365. The point of the code was obviously to conceal critical comment. One volume is entirely in cipher.113Harl. 482.

The reformer, 1641-2

Naturally in a devout, pious and reflective Protestant who considered himself old in the faith, D’Ewes’s principal interests in the opening months of the Long Parliament included religion. On 30 November he spoke to support Pym in his disgust at the profanation of the sabbath, and in mid-December supported the London petition for abolishing the church hierarchy, which was brought in by Isaac Penington and which D’Ewes considered ‘the weightiest matter that ever was yet handled in the House’; he also joined the chorus denouncing the new Canons brought in by Convocation.114Procs. LP, i. 373, 566-8, 622-4; Autobiography, ii. 254. On 6 January 1641, he warned against tempting providence by demolishing churches, and took a hard line on a number of assaults on true religion. He demanded that a miscreant who had kissed the altar should be made to kiss the bar of the Commons (8 Jan.), identified that clergy involving themselves in secular affairs was a grievance, and supported a wording of the brief given the grand committee of religion to investigate the whole government of the church, not merely its irregularities.115Procs. LP, ii. 124-5, 144, 173. He spoke in favour of purifying episcopacy (13 Jan.), and when Oliver Cromwell attacked Sir John Strangwayes for defending bishops, D’Ewes joined Pym and Denzil Holles in resisting calls for Cromwell to be brought to the bar for censure (9 Feb.). It is clear that at this point, D’Ewes was among those like Pym who were interested in exploring some kind of primitive episcopacy, although they had in mind the complete dispersal of bishops’ property and political influence.116Procs. LP, ii. 184, 398-9. What was essentially a historicist approach to the question of church reform lay behind his unwillingness, on the basis of his own studies, to recognize any difference between archbishops and bishops in the drafting of impeachment articles.117Procs. LP, ii. 711. He was in favour of subjecting Laud to an impeachment, and also supported the same process for John Cosin, backing those who wanted the impeachment articles to include the charge that Cosin had while dean of Durham employed Catholic workmen about the cathedral stained glass.118Procs. LP, ii. 530-1, 532, 677. His committee appointments on religious topics began in February 1641 with the bill against idolatry and later included a committee on complaints against bishops, not readily identifiable in the Commons Journal; the committee to prepare for a conference with the Lords on removing the clergy from secular employments, and the subsequent bill committee (1, 8 Mar.); the bill against pluralities (10 Mar.) and bills against abuses in church courts and specifically against Convocation (27 Apr.).119Procs. LP, ii. 519; CJ ii. 84b, 95a, 99a, 100b, 128b, 129a.

D’Ewes’s belief in the value of antiquarian precedent often marked him out from his colleagues. He opposed Cromwell’s motion for a bill for annual Parliaments, and got himself removed from the committee because he had spoken against the bill, a more rigorous and punctilious reading of the precedents than many would have followed.120Procs. LP, ii. 63-5. His own historical researches, rather than any political principle or view to tactical or factional advantage, predisposed him to the belief that the parliamentary franchise had once been wide in such boroughs as Salisbury and Seaford.121Procs. LP, i. 187, 566; ii. 363, 612-3. The same antiquarianism informed his perceptions of the Caernarvonshire elections dispute, where he demonstrated an understanding, albeit possibly overstated, that the Welsh spoken in north Wales could differ from that in the south.122Procs. LP, ii. 665. His contribution to cases of disputed elections were offered from the floor of the House or from the committees on specific cases to which he was named; for all the apparent respect shown him for his learning, it was not until December 1646 that he was named to the committee of privileges, and only then as part of a mass intake of 73 new members.123CJ ii. 40b, 49b, 95a; v. 14b. He was as reluctant to set new precedents as he was punctilious about observing old ones; while willing to offer his credit for £2,000 towards support of the army in the north, a notably generous sum compared with the pledges of his colleagues (3 Mar. 1641), he insisted that he wanted it noted as not a precedent for the future.124Procs. LP, ii. 615, 625. He could not share the view of John Pym that political necessity trumped precedent, and thus found himself at quite an early stage in the Parliament at odds with the master politician, though D’Ewes took pains to avoid a rift, protesting that ‘no man did more love that worthy Member’ than he.125Procs. LP, ii. 84-5, 498-9. This was no mere politeness, as he could be sharply critical of his colleagues. He dismissed Edmund Waller as too young and callow to be entrusted as a messenger to the Lords, and disapproved of John Wylde, ‘who would go on’, for his verbosity. Ironically, in the light of D’Ewes’s modern reputation for pomposity, he drew the attention of the House (11 Feb. 1641) to his own consciously-adopted style of speeches that were ‘short and extemporary’ rather than ‘long or set’.126Procs. LP, i. 589; ii. 21, 417.

The year 1641 saw the apogee of D’Ewes’s parliamentary career, if measured in terms of the number of committee nominations that came his way. That year he was called to serve on 66 committees, as against the 48 he totalled in 1642, with a subsequent sharp falling away in the years following. Taking D’Ewes’s career as a committeeman across its entire duration, one of his most regular accomplices was John Selden, with whom he shared 72 appointments. D’Ewes’s view of Selden was at best ambivalent. The two men had known each other long before the Suffolk man had entered Parliament; their acquaintanceship went back to 1624 and to meetings in Cotton’s house. By the late 1630s, D’Ewes had come to conclude that both Selden and Cotton were ‘more learned than pious’, and decided primly that this fault determined the fact that he ‘never sought after or ever attained any great entireness with them’. Indeed, he concluded that Selden’s faults were even more egregious than Cotton’s: he was a man ‘exceedingly puffed up with the apprehension of his own abilities’.127Autobiography, i. 256. There is little doubt that these were essentially scholarly rivalries, and although Selden and D’Ewes were named together to 15 committees in the first five months of D’Ewes’s parliamentary career, the latter had no qualms about disagreeing openly in the Commons with his senior colleague, over matters such as compensation to the Scots (3 Feb. 1641), which Selden said was beyond parliamentary authority and which D’Ewes saw as a prudent investment to secure peace.128Procs. LP, ii. 353. D’Ewes could not make an exception of university divines from the exclusion of clergy from the commission of the peace, unlike Selden (22 Apr.), and the two men quibbled over the wording of the Protestation (13 July).129Procs. LP, iv. 59; v. 616. As the political crisis deepened, however, D’Ewes came to see in Selden a kindred spirit rather than a rival; by June 1643, he described his colleague without malice or irony as ‘the great antiquary’ and the following month recorded how Selden deserved ‘admiration for his great depth of learning’; some months later, when deciding who should take a message to the Lords, they almost fell over each other in their show of mutual respect and deference (3 Jan. 1644).130Harl.164, f. 399v, Harl. 165, ff. 105, 268.

In the early months of 1641, D’Ewes was a fully paid up member of the group of enthusiasts for reform. He had been keen on the Strafford impeachment from the outset, but his opening contributions tended to be confined to advice on precedent, in keeping with his self-image. He deployed this knowledge against Strafford as well as in cautionary remarks to the prosecutors in the Commons. At one point he called for a protestation against the Lords’ concession to the earl that he should be allowed counsel as his mouthpiece, on the grounds that there was no precedent (26 Feb.). On 25 March he spoke to express impatience at the delays in Strafford’s trial, and at what he took to be the earl’s prevarications (he later complained that he had ‘spun out time to hours’), and four days later made clear his disapproval of Strafford’s request to the Lords for permission to take examinations of peers.131Procs. LP, ii. 563; iii. 131, 212, 479. When the notion of an attainder bill was mooted as a means of bypassing the sluggish pace of the trial, he opposed it on the usual grounds of precedent, having made his usual diligent searches. Even so, he was taken aback (14 Apr.) by how much support was beginning to emerge for Strafford, and the following day did his bit to break the silence suggestive of an awkward impasse by proposing a consultation with the Lords on the case.132Procs LP, iii. 513, 516, 552, 565. Pym opposed this suggestion, but the House adopted it, and on 15, 17 and 19 April, perhaps in order to reassert his anti-Strafford credentials, D’Ewes delivered speeches hostile to the peer.133Procs. LP, iii. 566-7, 569, 582, 607; iv. 9-10. He disliked the provisos that had been brought in (21 Apr.), but sustained his implacable hostility to Strafford to the end, warning of the possibility he might escape, and demanding his decapitation as the means of ending the ‘great and treacherous design’ (8 May).134Procs. LP, iv. 40, 123, 274. He was as anxious as any Member about the impact on the London crowd of any reprieve of Strafford, and willingly and unreservedly took the Protestation.135Autobiography, ii. 268-9; CJ ii. 133a.

On other topics, too, D’Ewes advocated radical reform. His regular if ad hoc interventions in favour of a wide parliamentary franchise, together with his own experience both as sheriff and candidate, were codified in his call for a bill on elections to enfranchise all resident adult males in boroughs, to restrict sheriffs to taking one poll and to outlaw electoral violence (30 Mar.).136Procs. LP, iii. 236-7. On religious issues, he took an aggressively iconoclastic line against deans and chapters; since they were ‘now useless’, he argued, ‘so we may well dispose of the revenue they possess’, despite the antiquity of their endowments (26 Mar.). He managed to quote the appropriate precedents for comparable encroachments, and was equally assertive on the bishops. He would have had Sir Thomas Aston* sent to the Tower for preferring a pro-episcopal petition to the Lords instead of the Commons, and would brook no ambiguity about the episcopate: ‘There is no Protestant that loves and allows [any but] a godly bishop; but the papists allow them all, good or bad’.137Procs. LP, iii. 154; iv. 6-7. This lack of sympathy with bishops bordered on a general anticlericalism, manifested in his wish to deny the clergy a role in civil office – ‘let scholars live like scholars’ – and his call that a special new tax be levied on them, as they were ‘very rich still’ (27 Apr., 14 May).138Procs. LP, iv. 76, 112, 379-80. He hoped that Sir John Culpeper would not be called to chair the committee of the whole House, on the grounds that he wanted to be able to rebut his pro-episcopalian arguments, and was duly combative in their encounter on 27 May. D’Ewes supported the bill to abolish the church hierarchy, arguing that English church government was of no great antiquity, had previously been riddled with superstition, and that secular activities had been the clergy’s ‘Diana’. He wanted a speech by William Pleydell*, in favour of the bishops, burned.139Procs. LP, iv. 414, 606-7. He supported the provincial investigations of the Committee for Scandalous Ministers (19 May), but turned down the chance to be on a committee for rationalizing parishes in Covent Garden, where he lodged (25 May), although he later seems to have changed his mind. He may have been a member of the Committee for Scandalous Ministers, though there is no Journal record of it, and he never joined the Committee for Plundered Ministers.140Procs. LP, iv. 466, 560; CJ ii. 191b; PJ ii. 297. Perhaps this apparent reluctance to engage in practical reform of the clergy was conditioned by his own struggles with Richard Damport or Danford, the minister at Stowlangtoft, whom D’Ewes had known since 1625, and whose rebarbativeness wore D’Ewes down. ‘God freed me from that pest!’ he confided to his Latin diary in April 1644 when he heard of Damport’s resignation.141Harl. 483, f. 50; McGee, Industrious Mind, 118, 181-2.

D’Ewes supported an alliance with the covenanted Scots. He had been sympathetic to their position after the end of the bishops’ wars, and supported negotiations with them. By April 1641, he was concerned that they should not be antagonised, and repudiated what he regarded as the intemperately anti-Scottish speeches of Gervase Holles*. The following month he was articulating notions of brotherly unity with the Scots, and it was evidently the religious aspects of an alliance that appealed to him most.142Procs. LP, ii. 237-8, 334, 353; iii. 413-4; iv. 96, 416-7. His general enthusiasm for the Scots made him on this topic a natural fellow-traveller with the so-called junto, especially when he offered support to the view that armed conflict between the two nations should be subject to the approval of the two Parliaments. There were limits to his Scotophilia, however, as he corrected the Speaker over an answer to Scottish commissioners; D’Ewes thought the Scots should pay for access to trade with the English colonies (22 May), which he sought to protect by realistic impositions on tobacco. Once more, however, he declined to serve on the committee that was to provide the ‘brotherly assistance’, as he was troubled by doubts over its purpose and its financial soundness.143Procs. LP, iv. 461-2, 531, 689-90; v. 274. On fiscal matters in general, he represented himself to the House as unqualified to pronounce, ‘least able to speak to matters of that nature’, but characteristically had plenty to say nevertheless.144Procs. LP, iv. 721. His interventions were more informed by a concern for the revenue potential of fiscal innovation rather than by any value as instruments in bending the king to the will of Parliament. He adhered to the critique of the economy he had developed while struggling with his Ship Money responsibilities. When the economy picked up, taxpayers would be more compliant; the political crisis was inhibiting private spending. He approved of the poll tax, but consistently argued for a reduction of the rate of 12d proposed for the poorest payers, thus pitting himself against Pym.145Procs. LP, iv. 721; v. 222, 295, 385. He was in favour of modernising the subsidy, simply because changing the basis of the tax would bring in more money more quickly.146Procs. LP, iv. 738. He was as alive to the social implications for the propertied of direct taxation, as he was to its burden on the poor. Those seeking to limit their liability by declaring themselves gentlemen when they were reputed esquires should subsequently be officially reduced to the lower rank.147Procs. LP, v. 493.

After the political watershed of Strafford’s execution in May 1641, D’Ewes maintained his interest in the reform drive, and spoke on more than one occasion to denounce what he saw as the trend for the Commons’ workload to fall on to some 80 activists, while other Members disappeared in the afternoons to plays or games of bowls. He supported the device of calling the House as a remedy.148Procs. LP, iv. 113, 174, 506, 511. It remained a consistent concern of his that the work of the House fell heavily on a small number while others took ‘their ease and pleasure’; he supported the imposition of fines on absentees, and as the political crisis deepened, he would become more deeply troubled still by the question of membership.149PJ i. 439; ii. 185. He thought that the junto and in particular the men he saw as the most uncompromising opponents of the king benefited from low attendances, and deplored the political test implied in linking the call of the House with declarations of money donations by Members (10 June 1642), as threatening ‘the very liberty and freedom’ of the Commons. A week after that, he went so far as to allege that up to 50 MPs might be sitting unlawfully, because of unexamined election irregularities.150PJ iii. 58, 96.

He remained interested particularly in religious affairs and in dismantling the remains of the king’s personal rule such as knighthood fines (24 June 1641).151Procs. LP, v. 314. He remained willing to identify agents of the government’s regime of the 1630s that needed punishing, such as the customs farmers, and sought to close off avenues for their escape.152Procs. LP, iv. 548-9, 561-3; v. 187, 252. He seems to have missed the political implications of certain fiscal proposals, important ammunition to the junto leaders; whether tonnage and poundage was paid directly to the king or to commissioners in trust mattered less to him than that the bill should be passed (28 May).153Procs. LP, iv. 626-7, 677; v. 206. For some time, a distance had begun to be visible between his construction of events and that of the junto. Unlike Pym and his associates, D’Ewes was keen to keep separate, rather than to conflate, such matters as the queen mother’s influence and the unrest on the London streets (11 May), and he looked askance at the tendency of Pym and his ally Sir Thomas Barrington to call for dramatic gestures such as securing the chamber door in response to agitation outside.154Procs. LP, iv. 321, 342-3. He was suspicious of granting away authority to any ‘close committee’ (11-13 May).155Procs. LP, iv. 359-60. By mid-June he had become suspicious and resentful of the junto leaders, confiding to his diary the ‘serpentine subtlety’ of John Hampden* and Pym, who adopted a variety of tactics to ensure bills were debated without due notice to Members.156Procs. LP, v. 90, 91. Much of this antipathy arose because the junto leaders offended against his punctilious view of precedent and procedure; in other situations he could support the views, if not the style of expression, of Henry Marten* on the proper role of privy council as the king’s advisory body; and on attainder bills as the most efficient way to proceed against Ship Money judges, as the prospect loomed of a recess.157Procs. LP, v. 402, 436-7.

A consistent parliamentary interest of D’Ewes’s, remote from questions of domestic reform, was that of the palatinate of Bohemia. On 7 July he delivered a speech on the subject, in support of the king’s manifesto announcing the despatch of an ambassador to a conference at Regensburg (Ratisbon) attempting to end the war in Europe. The speech was then printed, the author evidently setting aside his previous scruples about the legitimacy of publishing speeches.158Procs. LP, v. 532; A Speech delivered in the House of Commons (1641, E.198.38); LJ iv. 300b-301b. D’Ewes had taken an active interest in the misfortunes of the ruling house of the palatinate since 1636, when at Newmarket he met and was well received by the prince elector, Charles Louis. While implicitly attributing an affinity between the prince and himself to a mutual recognition of spiritual sensibility, D’Ewes complacently recorded how others thought they hit it off because the prince identified himself with the D’Ewes family history: a lower Saxony house whose possessions had been usurped by the Spanish occupiers.159Autobiography, ii. 137-40. Subsequent to this meeting, D’Ewes began to write letters to the prince’s widowed mother that contained English news and expressions of support for her family, in a spirit of Protestant solidarity.160Harl. 383, ff. 133-4, Harl. 377, f. 134. The king’s announcement of an envoy to Regensburg apparently in support of his nephew and his claim was therefore a golden opportunity for D’Ewes to present himself as the prince’s champion, and doubtless he arranged for the printing of his own speech. After the king’s manifesto was read in the House (5 July), he was first named to the committee to search the Journals for earlier parliamentary pronouncements on restoring the prince to his rightful inheritance, and was indignant on the 7th when Barrington asserted that the committee had not yet met: it had already assembled twice.161Procs. LP, v. 496, 532; CJ ii. 199b.

The pattern of D’Ewes’s committee appointments in the spring and summer of 1641 reflected his reforming interests. They included committees to stamp out knighthood fines (20 Mar.), on preventing electoral disorder (30 Mar.), to better promote the gospel (12 Apr.), to review the procedure of star chamber (4 May) and to assess the delinquency of customs officials (22 May).162CJ ii. 109b, 114a, 119a, 134a, 154b. His knowledge of precedent was in demand in the summer, as Parliament struggled with the implications of the king’s intended journey to Scotland, and it was probably because of his usefulness in matters connected with records and the law that he was included on a number of committees with the Lords and in the Recess Committee (9 Sept.).163CJ ii. 187b, 190b, 196a, 201a, 207a, 252b, 273a, 281a, 288b. He was still advocating the abolition of cathedral hierarchies and reducing the episcopate to a primitive condition, so that there should be ‘as many bishops as we have parishes’: in other words abolishing them in all but name.164Procs. LP, v. 92-3, 110, 163-8, 254. On 9 July, he brought in a bill of his own, to prevent vexatious legal suits by clergy and other tithe-owners, and on 17 July expressed his approval of the ordination of clergy in each county by a committee of five ministers, a proposal that would later be embodied in essence by Cromwellian legislation.165Procs. LP, v. 575, 684. Given his interest in books – he brought the House to laughter when he declared that to help ease the Anglo-Scots tensions he would sell ‘all but his books’ (20 Feb. 1641) – he was naturally drawn to committees on licensing and publishing, and claimed membership of two, although oddly there is sparse mention of it in the Journal.166Procs. LP, ii. 499-500; iv. 411; CJ ii. 45b. He drew to the attention of the House two pamphlets he considered scandalous: one a populist and xenophobic attack on the French ambassador; the other a skit printed in black-letter, that conflated Protestant godliness of the kind espoused by D’Ewes with the wilder reaches of separatism.167Procs. LP, v. 597, 602, 607; A True Relation of the French Embassage (1641, E.165.2); J. Taylor, The Brownists Conventicle (1641, E.164.13). On the other hand, when there were denunciations in the Commons of a new, though entirely orthodox, creed published by John Turner, a victim of Laud, he could see ‘nothing amiss’ in it.168Procs. LP, iv. 435; J. Turner, The Saints Beliefe (1641). His wariness of printing parliamentary speeches began to recede when he understood the potential of print as an educative medium, and advocated printing explanatory glosses on the Protestation, the poll tax and the sitting of the Houses on a Sunday.169Procs. LP, iv. 217, 378; v. 634, vi. 293. He doubtless approved publication of his contribution to a debate on 11 June, in which he exposed to his own satisfaction as fraudulent the received wisdom on the early episcopate of Asia Minor, adding to the pamphlet his speech of 2 July at a conference of both Houses, when he argued from historical precedent that the Commons could justly claim authority to set poll tax rates for peers.170The Greeke Postscripts of the Epistles (1641), sig. A3, A311-v (E.167.4).

In the high summer of 1641, D’Ewes’s parliamentary work was checked by the death of his wife on 27 July, but also by intimations that not everyone in the Commons admired him. His efforts on behalf of Sir Frederick Hamilton, an Irish landowner and victim of an injustice by Strafford were nearly vitiated by John Wylde*, and when D’Ewes went to consult precedents on procedures in a recess, for the benefit of a committee, he found on his return only one of his colleagues left to listen to his findings. He took a week off for his wife’s obsequies, and was slow to speak again when he returned.171Procs. LP, vi. 41, 119-20, 181, 240-1. The architect of the Recess Committee, John Pym, as ever driven by urgency and pragmatism, would have had limited patience with D’Ewes’s endless antiquarian searches, but the latter’s views on the recess broadly accorded with those of the junto leaders; this, together with his potential usefulness as a scholarly apologist, probably explains why he was named to the Recess Committee in his absence.172Procs. LP, vi. 521, 568-9, 717; CJ ii. 288b. With Selden, he was critical of the bill for disarming recusants as containing elements inimical to both common law and statute law (27 Aug.).173Procs. LP, vi. 580, 583. Nevertheless, it was undoubtedly the prospect of religious reform that kept D’Ewes so interested. He was named in August to committees on the impeachment of bishops and removing communion tables in educational institutions from their Laudian location.174CJ ii. 252b, 278b. After a two-hour debate on the recess on 26 August, he expressed the hope that ‘one great bill’ on religion would emerge, and spoke in the following days in favour of levelling chancels and protection for the ‘pure’ Book of Common Prayer, as it had been before the ‘wicked additions’ by the advisers of Charles I.175Procs. LP, vi. 568-9, 626, 635

D’Ewes was not among the core group in the Recess Committee, nor did he expect to be. On a number of occasions the key members of it had assembled before he arrived for meetings.176D'Ewes (C), 2, 6, 8. He bore this with no rancour, and saw the unfolding of plots through much the same eyes as the junto leaders. In fact, he had been more unforgiving of the army plotters of spring 1641 than Pym, in some respects. He was baffled, for example, by the latter’s indulgence towards the army pay claim of Hugh Pollarde*.177Procs. LP, vi. 690, 710-11. He attributed ‘The Incident’ in Scotland to conniving clergy (20 Oct.), and when news came of the Irish Rebellion he confided to his diary that he had seen it coming. He called for an urgent despatch of a punitive expeditionary force, for once shelving his concerns about liberties that apparently moved Henry Marten* and Sir John Hotham* to object to pressing soldiers.178D'Ewes (C), 14, 63, 83, 84. He was an enthusiast for accepting Scots help in this venture, and voiced indignation at suggestions that the Covenanters would want to be paid for their services. To his mind, the urgency of the Irish crisis overrode other political considerations. The junto leaders might see it as a bargaining tool with the king, but D’Ewes thought that to tell the king that Parliament would not co-operate in setting out an army unless he divested himself of all evil counsellors ran the risk of losing the whole kingdom of Ireland.179D'Ewes (C), 91-3, 100-1. He was in favour of the drastic expedient of allowing Spanish coinage to circulate in Ireland, wanted a declaration that Catholicism would never be tolerated there, and by mid-December called for another £200,000 to be raised for the Irish expedition. He advocated sending arms to Scotland for this purpose, arguing against Sir John Culpeper, and against John Northcote urged equal pay for soldiers of both countries. Despite the empirical approach he adopted to this crisis, he could still speak on behalf of Charles Price’s* claim to an army commission in Ireland on the grounds that Price was descended from an ‘ancient British’ family.180D'Ewes (C), 114, 127, 254, 284-5, 293, 294.

Just before the recess, D’Ewes had been named to a committee on the case of Sir Frederick Hamilton, whom he had been trying to assist for nearly a year.181CJ ii. 279b. Befriending supplicants to Parliament seems to have come naturally to D’Ewes, and on 12 October 1641 he first became aware of the difficulties endured by Louis, count of Egmont, rightful claimant to the dukedom of Gelderland, the Dutch province from which the D’Ewes family had emigrated. As a Catholic refugee, Egmont had in 1641 suffered the attentions of officials searching for recusants in London, and his petition was referred to a committee on 9 October.182 D'Ewes (C), 5 and n. On 20 November, D’Ewes spoke to defend Egmont from allegations that he was a dangerous papist, and succeeded in exonerating him, only to have to repeat the exercise more than once when the count again fell under suspicion.183D'Ewes (C), 173, 369-70; Harl. 164, ff. 266v, 267. On one occasion, D’Ewes was not above taking money from the count as a reward.184D'Ewes (C), 370. Doubtless there was an affinity between the two men which despite their opposed religious affiliations, sprang from their shared heritage in Gelderland. In September 1643, D’Ewes worked to acquire a pass for Egmont to go to Münster on a quest to recover some of his ancestral lands, and backed Egmont’s plan to go to Oxford to bid a personal farewell to the king.185Harl. 165, ff. 172, 249. After Egmont had returned, D’Ewes included him in his social circle, and the two met regularly.186Harl. 483, ff. 159v, 201, Harl. 484, f. 17v. In August 1645, D’Ewes tried his best to warn the count of an impending armed search by soldiers and officials of one of Parliament’s executive committees, and went to Egmont’s house in Holborn several times during this episode, on one occasion observing the besieged count peering back at him from a window.187Harl. 484, ff. 19-21.

For D’Ewes, his friendship with Egmont transcended the fear of Catholics that gripped so many of his parliamentary colleagues. His own enthusiasm for reform of the Church of England remained keen in the last months of 1641. He was still actively in favour of curbing the political activities of the clergy, and supported William Strode I in insisting on a clause in the bill to prohibit them from secular public life that depicted their involvement as invariably deleterious. He again declared himself to be against university divines serving as magistrates, arguing against Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, Henry Lucas and Edward Hyde (22 Oct).188D'Ewes (C), 25-6, 28, 30. He persisted with his belief in the remedy of reducing bishops to a primitive condition, and it is clear that in October 1641 he meant this literally, and saw the division in the House as between those like himself who wanted barefoot bishops, and those who wanted simply to modify the existing structure; contradicting Sir Walter Erle, who declared the choice to be between abolition or primitivism. He openly opposed the making of five new bishops.189D'Ewes (C), 51, 53. He was a supporter both of the Grand Remonstrance and the ‘Root and Branch’ petition, and defended the petitioning Londoners from criticism by Edmund Waller and Culpeper that they incited unruly crowds. He approved even of the riot-prone apprentices in their petitioning against episcopacy (23 Dec.).190D'Ewes (C), 117, 166, 205-6, 225, 230, 231, 337. However radical his sympathies were on religious reform, he stopped abruptly short of pursuing the logic of his position. While he wanted all the bishops to be named in the Remonstrance and enjoyed the amused support of the House in addressing legal difficulties with their impeachments (13 Nov.), he wanted any reference in the Remonstrance that implied reluctance by the king to pass remedial legislation struck out, and preferred to divert the attention of the House towards the examination of conspirators rather than address the inclusion of the Prayer Book in it.191D'Ewes (C), 135, 143, 151. He disliked Sir Arthur Hesilrige’s bill for a militia under the control of a lord general as of ‘too great and vast an extent’ (7 Dec.) and tried unsuccessfully to modify a petition to the king that he should not interfere with bills before passing them (16 Dec.).192D'Ewes (C), 245, 299-300. Nor was he persuaded of the need for a wholesale legislative assault in the interests of a ‘reformation of manners’. He considered the existing laws against drinking and swearing sufficiently robust, calling for a new statute only to cover explicitly the moral lapses of magistrates.193D'Ewes (C), 343.

On 1 December, D’Ewes was chosen to take a petition and a declaration to the king at Hampton Court, by a process that seems more accidental than planned.194CJ ii. 327a, 328b; D'Ewes (C), 219-20. The package presented to the king included an emollient congratulatory address on his safe return from Scotland, but also an appeal to help the Commons remove bishops from the Lords and purge ‘corruption’ from the church, a word which D’Ewes had defended in debate against John Coventry* (27 Nov.).195D'Ewes (C), 205-6. D’Ewes’s diary is silent on the details of his mission, but it was the religious reform content of the petition that evidently interested him, fitting with his defence of London ‘root and branch’ activists. He was included in a further direct approach to the king, on 17 December, when both Houses petitioned over what they took to be the king’s breach of privilege when he spoke three days earlier about matters still before the Houses.196CJ ii. 345a-346a, 346b; D'Ewes (C), 323. These two addresses to the king were the first of their kind that D’Ewes had been entrusted with, but his tasks left him unaware of the impending attempted coup by the king. When on 30 December, Pym revealed intelligence of imminent danger to the House, D’Ewes was sceptical, regarding the protective restraints on movements around the chamber as excessive, and as usual elevating precedent and statute over the demands of an emergency.197D'Ewes (C), 365-6. When on 4 January 1642 the king and his retinue invaded the chamber in pursuit of the Five Members, D’Ewes had a ringside seat for the drama, as Charles passed immediately in front of him on his way to the Speaker’s chair. After this, he needed no further persuading of the enormity of the crisis, and considered by the end of the day that a massacre had been intended after the king had left the field to his disorderly attendants.198D'Ewes (C), 381-3. He dropped his legalistic objections to the Commons meeting outside the palace of Westminster, and attended the committee at the Guildhall himself on the 6th.199D'Ewes (C), 386, 387. His uncompromising speech there in favour of disregarding warrants or other documents that had been created to justify the attempted arrests, and his successful argument that the liberties of subjects as well as parliamentary privilege had been breached (besting a weaker formulation by John Wylde) shows D’Ewes to have been then at his most incisive. His speech was printed, and might have been the address that drew private congratulations from Henry Rich†, 1st earl of Holland, who deplored the actions of men of ‘violence’.200D'Ewes (C), 389-90, 391, 394, 395-6; Two Speeches spoke by Sir Simonds D'Ewes (1642), 5-6 (E.196.25); Harl. 286, f. 313.

In the immediate aftermath of 4 January 1642, D’Ewes drew closer to the junto leadership in his outlook, moved partly by sympathy towards the intended victims of the coup and partly outraged at the motives of its perpetrators. He was supported by Pym in choosing wording for a request to the Lords to sit (11 Jan.), and succeeded in quashing a move by Edmund Waller to disregard what D’Ewes considered a popish libel. He saw the Protestation, once a valuable means of preventing Strafford evade justice, as now useful in preserving the safety of Parliament. He wanted Peregrine Pelham* to go north to help garrison Hull for Parliament, and was ‘much troubled’ at the rejection of Pelham’s offer, which was vitiated by the scruples of Sir John Hotham*.201PJ i. 33-4, 37, 39, 113, 116. He urged rejection of the king’s offer to replenish one of the Irish magazines, and considered himself to have contributed to the strategy advanced initially by Oliver Cromwell* of making Charles, prince of Wales in effect a ward of Parliament.202PJ i. 45, 64. He took a similar view to the junto on raising money from the City for the Irish expedition, moving the House on the priority of supply over the preferences of the citizens for preliminary redress of their grievances, and going to the City as part of a parliamentary delegation. He was himself named to the committee for removing obstacles to supplying Ireland (24 Jan).203PJ i. 135-6, 162; CJ ii. 391a. He was willing to see six named peers excluded from the Lords, voted for James Stuart, 1st duke of Richmond to be declared an evil counsellor and was as harsh against the alleged apostacy of Sir Edward Dering* as any in the House, wanting the Kent man excluded from Parliament for ever and sent to the Tower, his book of speeches to be burnt in five separate places.204PJ i. 107, 191, 253, 254, 255. It was D’Ewes that Cromwell identified as the ideal person to write a confutation of Dering’s book; he declined on the grounds that he was too busy on other public business, and suggested that Cromwell himself should take up his pen.205PJ i. 293. D’Ewes spoke at length and evidently to effect in support of impeaching (Sir) Edward Herbert I.206PJ i. 357-9, 363.

The political crisis did not diminish his interest in religious reform. D’Ewes was added to the committee to prepare charges against the 12 bishops (25 Jan.), and between 1 February and 4 April was called to committees on a catechism for Ireland, on suppressing innovations (a fresh committee on a well-worn theme), on maintenance of the ministry and (with Pym, Selden and Francis Rous) on a declaration to vindicate church doctrine.207CJ ii. 394b, 427a, 438a, 467b, 476b, 496b, 510b. While he maintained his concern for ministers whose consciences would not allow them to use the Prayer Book, he saw the events of January as encouraging the ‘malignant’ clergy. He thought Arminianism was no more than a modern repackaging of the ancient heresy of Pelagianism, ‘a contagion and poison that hath almost overspread the whole Church of England’, and in a speech to the House on 12 February recalled a time when in church no-one bowed at the name of Jesus.208PJ i. 137-8, 337, 355. On the 21st, he spoke to move the relief of Ireland and the passage of the bishops’ exclusion bill ahead of considering a message from the king.209PJ i. 426-7. He amplified his own vision of county committees for ordination of clergy, expressed in July 1641, to include an added function of nominating divines for a synod or assembly.210PJ i. 134-5. When his opinions received endorsement from dubious quarters, he was prepared to hold his nose; a ‘dangerous and ignorant speech’ by Henry Marten (8 Feb.) and repeated interventions by Sir Arthur Hesilrige, ‘though I much respected him for his integrity’ (26 Feb.), were examples where D’Ewes restrained himself from open criticism in the interests of continued, fragile, harmony.211PJ i. 313, 473-4. On the subject of reversing religious ‘innovations’ which was moving in a direction that was not a mere restoration to the status quo ante, D’Ewes was, as an eminent antiquary, disturbed at the threat to monuments in churches by legislative condemnation of them as superstitious. In May 1644, it was on his own motion that the committee on superstitious monuments sat again, D’Ewes perhaps compensating for his qualms about demolishing family tombs by asserting that he was nevertheless ‘against organs always’.212PJ ii. 32; Harl. 166, ff. 52v, 57v.

Limits to reform, 1642

Certain principles always bounded D’Ewes’s radicalism in the opening year or so of the Long Parliament, most in evidence in his wish to grant the king necessary supply, without insisting on the conditions which were a vital aspect of the junto’s strategic thinking. He was sensitive to anything that might subtract from the king’s honour. He abhorred even a mention of the rumour that the Commons contemplated articles against the queen (14 Jan. 1642), and deplored the rejection by Pym, Holles and ‘crafty’ St John of the tonnage and poundage bill which the king himself had proposed (26 Jan.).213PJ i. 65-6, 177, 179. He applauded the bill for £400,000, perhaps because of the broadness of its appeal to the need for defence of the realm, but delays in progressing it troubled him, if not the junto managers, who he thought procrastinated and promoted other business ahead of it.214PJ i. 412, 426-7; ii. 19. By mid-March he was willing to set aside his scruples about the inequalities of rating in the bill, especially as they affected Suffolk, in the interests of seeing the bill reach the statute book, and on 8 April actually spoke against making changes to it.215PJ ii. 27, 141-2, 239. As an authority on parliamentary precedent, he tried to emphasise the difference between an act of Parliament and an ordinance, and when the Militia Ordinance was first brought in, was keen to clarify the distinction for the benefit of John Whistler* and Samuel Browne*, who thought that royal assent would in itself endow the legislation with the status of an act. He may well have considered that the militia bill was bound to be a temporary expedient so long as it continued an ordinance, although as early as 28 February he left the House prematurely because he was upset at the conflict between the king and Commons over the topic. He found himself first-named to a committee with the Lords on the militia (18 Mar.) because of his authoritative speech on the wording.216PJ i. 310, 481; ii. 41, 56; CJ ii. 485b. When the prospect came into view of a watered-down militia bill that the king might approve, D’Ewes found himself opposing Henry Marten, who argued that the original ordinance should be adhered to.217PJ ii. 191-2. D’Ewes sought to modify a declaration (5 Mar.) because it was ‘full of irritating and rigid expressions to his majesty’.218PJ i. 512-3. It has been pointed out that his familiar depiction of the junto managers and most outspoken opponents of the king as ‘fiery spirits’ drew on imagery used by James I, and it is visible in embryo in the spring of 1642 when he confided to his diary in cipher his impatience and resentment at Pym’s ‘asperity and fieriness’ (9 Apr.); his own contribution to debate being interrupted by ‘indiscreet and violent spirits’ (14 Apr.) or by ‘hotter and more violent spirits’ (20 May) or ‘violent spirits’ (21 May, 4 June). In most of these expressions, D’Ewes was smarting after a speech of his was disrupted or if a political move calculated in his view to alienate the king still further was making headway.219PJ i. 503; ii. 148, 170-1, 349-50, 357; iii. 17; McGee, Industrious Mind, 365-8.

Beyond the topic of religious reform, D’Ewes’s committee appointments tended to reflect accurately his personal interests in public life. He remained committed to the cause of re-establishing the king’s government in Ireland, serving on committees to prevent Irish Catholics reaching England (21 Feb.) and on dialogue with the king over travel passes to Ireland (8 Mar.). D’Ewes led the way on 27 April with an offer of £50 for the relief of Ireland which he declared unconditional, not dependent on a future grant of land. He seems to have been surprised at how well his gesture was received.220CJ ii. 447a, 472a, 544a; PJ ii. 233. His awareness of European affairs recommended him for nomination to committees on the Dutch merchant strangers (26 Mar.), the affront to the Tuscan ambassador (14 Apr.), and on intelligence from Denmark (21 Apr.).221CJ ii. 499a, 526b, 529b, 535b; PJ ii. 176, 331. He was a self-confessed sympathiser with the Protestant Dutch, presenting a petition on behalf of Dutch merchants, the failure of which he attributed to xenophobia. He was helpful to the Dutch ambassador as he was to the Tuscan, speaking in the House to vindicate him against libels.222PJ ii. 78, 97-8, 124-5. These sympathies ran across the European confessional divide, to include Portugal as well as Tuscany, but D’Ewes nevertheless voted with Oliver Cromwell in favour of a double duty imposition on aliens importing sugar (17 Mar.), no doubt with English colonial welfare in mind.223PJ ii. 51, 53. He evidently distinguished between ‘moderate and temperate’ Catholics, especially those hostile to the Habsburg dynasty, and those who were treacherous, or ‘Jesuit’, or hispanicized. This was the distinction he made when opposing Cromwell (3 May), who sought to expel all Catholics from Dublin.224PJ ii. 268-9.

It was evidently a matter of great personal distress to D’Ewes that the king seemed intent on playing into the hands of his critics, not to say his enemies, in Parliament. Rather clutching at a straw, he supported Sir Henry Vane I in calling for a ‘new foundation’ to royal-parliamentary relations (1 Apr.). The following day, he refuted the assertion by Nathaniel Fiennes I that the king had no power of veto over bills passed by both Houses, and to avoid another confrontation with the monarch argued that a vindication of the Five Members could be credibly achieved simply by a declaration of both Houses, without the royal involvement implied in a bill.225PJ ii. 115, 119, 125. But when Pym reported the king’s summons to the peers to join him at York, D’Ewes felt bound to characterize as dangerous the elevation of privy council over Parliament, ‘the great council of the kingdom’. His attempts to clarify the wording of the Commons’ disapproval of the king’s proposal to lead an expedition to Ireland armed from the Hull arsenal were interrupted by the ‘violent spirits’, but he took the gravest view of the crisis at Hull: ‘‘No man could doubt but that if God did not prevent it, those sad and fatal beginnings must at last produce a civil war to the loss of Ireland and the destruction of England’ (16 Apr.).226PJ ii. 165, 170-1, 182. Three days after the king’s humiliation at Hull, when the city gates remained closed in his face, D’Ewes claimed to have ‘crushed’ a motion by William Strode I to instruct Sir John Hotham to refuse the king admittance to the town, and pushed for a conciliatory declaration to be printed.227PJ ii. 225-6, 242-3 In the aftermath of this episode he tried repeatedly to argue for the most emollient wording in parliamentary published statements, and against any votes that might prove a Rubicon on relations with the king.228PJ ii. 274, 344, 349-50, 376-7; iii. 102. His pronouncements irritated the ‘violent spirits’, who sometimes resorted to ridicule. On 21 May, D’Ewes’s speech on the king’s powers of veto, larded with precedents, provoked Strode to compare historical records to the Old Testament Gibeonites’ ‘old bottles and shoes’: to the antiquary’s indignation and outrage, because the objects in question had figured in the deceit that led to the Gibeonites’ enslavement.229PJ ii. 345-7; Joshua 9: 3-27. On occasion, D’Ewes was despondent, as on 16 May, after hearing how the parliamentary delegation to York had fared, and he spoke in the House about his will and provision for the safety of his library; but only two weeks afterwards, and despite all the evidence to the contrary, he declared that the rift between king and Parliament arose ‘rather ... from fancy and misunderstanding than from any real difference that is between us’.230PJ ii. 324-5, 392.

The incident on 21 May, when Strode’s apt and ready biblical citation evidently eclipsed D’Ewes’s worthy survey of precedent, sowed enmity between the two men, which lasted until D’Ewes penned a sour and dismissive obituary of Strode in Latin in 1645.231Harl. 484, f. 29. D’Ewes sarcastically claimed reluctance to quote from records lest he was ‘vilified’ by the Devon man (14 June 1642), opposed him over the sitting of a committee on elections (17 June), triumphantly confided to his diary in cipher an occasion when he ‘nipped’ Strode (28 June), contradicted him on how to deal with circuit judges hostile to Parliament (14 July), and raised a point of order during Strode’s efforts to persuade the City court of alderman to appoint a locum tenens when the lord mayor was absent (15 July).232PJ iii. 75, 96, 145, 214, 218. Against the background of this personal sniping, the political crisis was rapidly accelerating towards civil war. In his determination to cling on to the belief that disaster could be averted, D’Ewes sometimes lapsed into sententious platitude, as on 8 June when he asserted that ‘the surest way ... to be prepared is not to talk of preparation’, and generally his positions on the business of each day ran contrary to the House’s direction of travel.233PJ iii. 43-4. When the king’s answer to Parliament’s Nineteen Propositions was in debate, he argued – for once – against a general motion for an accommodation, preferring detailed analysis of the king’s stated position; then only to produce precedents that Parliament had no right to insist that the king took the advice of the Houses, precedents which were promptly repudiated (24 June). The most he would allow was that the privy council should be accountable to Parliament on matters proper to Parliament.234PJ iii. 120, 128-9, 130. This conservatism was coupled with regular opposition to local military initiatives on behalf of Parliament: on compelling deputy lieutenants to muster; on fortifying Hull; at Nottingham; in Leicestershire and Lincolnshire; at sea; on the proposals by the Committee of Safety to appoint a lord general and raise an army (12 July).235PJ iii. 17, 116, 152, 167, 171, 176, 196-7, 202-3, 209, 217.

D’Ewes’s brother, Richard, a professional soldier, was by this time in the king’s camp at York, and Richard tried to attract Sir Simonds to join him there. A secret meeting between the pair probably took place in London, and if it occurred, is the likely explanation of the repair to their previously strained relationship.236McGee, Industrious Mind, 365-7. These family ties and his growing lack of sympathy with the parliamentary leaders were influential upon him, and the wonder is that D’Ewes remained in the House. In June he told his brother how he ‘often repented’ being in Parliament.237Harl. 379, f. 96. In fact, however, he played a full part in committee work in the spring and summer of 1642. Even though on occasion, such as 4 July, when he felt so overwhelmed by a sense of impending ‘ruin and confusion’ that it affected his capacity to take notes, he as yet showed little outward sign of the sense of alienation he was beginning to harbour.238PJ iii. 158. He was particularly in demand for committees on records and papers: on the form of the king’s coronation oath and the treason laws (16 May, 20 June); on scrutinizing the details of the treaty with the Scots (2 June); on suppressing publications hostile to Parliament (7 June) or to the king or the Scots (15 June) and to work on an order that any MP attending assizes should endeavour to vindicate parliamentary proceedings (14 July).239CJ ii. 572b, 601a, 611a, 624b, 634a, 671b. On a number of these scrutinizing committees he served alongside Selden, with whom he must have felt an affinity, despite the rivalry between them. Both men were on committees to disrupt distribution of the king’s commission of array (17 June), and to prepare a declaration in response to the king’s vindication of himself from allegations that he was a papist.240CJ ii. 630a, 632a, 635b; His Maiestie's Royall Declaration and Protestation (1642). What undoubtedly motivated D’Ewes above all was his enduring belief in the possibility of religious reform. As he told his brother, he fervently hoped that

Religion might be established in that power and purity amongst us and preaching so settled in those places where atheism, profaneness and ignorance now reign, as that all men might know their duty to God and the king.241Quoted in McGee, Industrious Mind, 366.

Perhaps influenced by the general drift towards polarisation, he shifted his position on the Prayer Book in the summer of 1642. In a debate on the king’s answer to the Propositions (28 June), D’Ewes expressed a belief that if the original architects of the Book of Common Prayer could see how much damage the structure of church government had inflicted on godliness, they would have reconsidered the whole project. As an aspect of his call for the House to petition the king for an accommodation (6 July), an attempt to derail Henry Marten’s motion on developing the defences at Hull, he reminded Members that the main thing still not secured from the legislative reform programme, which was by this time surely appearing superseded, was religion.242PJ iii. 146, 176.

Despite his significant contribution to proceedings, he was dealt an injury on 23 July which in his recording of it would reduce the recent spat with Strode to a pin-prick. The main business of the House at that point was the continuing exchange of tense messages between Parliament and the king, and the co-ordination of the response of the two Houses. On the 23rd, D’Ewes spoke to assure the House that the power to adjourn the Irish Parliament resided in the lords justices, still in Ireland, and that no further power needed to be given the 2nd earl of Leicester (Robert Sidney†), still intended as director of Parliament’s planned invading force. Then, on a request by the Speaker, he pronounced against passing a declaration in response to one of the king’s without a second reading, partly because he thought the content redundant, and partly out of irritation with Pym and Nathaniel Fiennes I. This provoked a fierce response in which the junto associates queued up to attack D’Ewes. Strode, Alexander Carew, Fiennes, Holles and Marten contributed to the mobbing. His exact offence was to have said that ‘there were many things in this declaration that were taken out of men’s pockets and budgets and before printed’.243CJ ii. 687b-688a. Edmund Waller tried to placate the House, and as D’Ewes left the chamber in mortification some caught his cloak to encourage him to stay. He was called back in, only to be compelled to apologise to the House, and what D’Ewes found particularly humiliating in all this was the Speaker’s condescension in his reproof; Lenthall characterised D’Ewes’s offence as all the worse because of his ‘great knowledge and learning’. D’Ewes was crushed by the ‘horrible ingratitude and injustice’ shown him, feelings intensified later by reports reaching him that some had joined in the attack only for a laugh at his expense. He resolved never to speak and write in the Commons again, and his diary-keeping habit was permanently altered; from this point onwards, he always wrote up back in his lodgings, not in the chamber.244PJ iii. 256, 257, 258, 259.

When constructing his account of this episode, D’Ewes explicitly recorded that he had for months concurred with the ‘fiery spirits’ in the hope that something concrete would be achieved in religious policy.245PJ iii. 259. He stayed away from the House until 24 August, even then only attending the reconstituted committee of printing for an hour, and it was 27 August before he made another speech.246PJ iii. 314, 323-4; CJ ii. 734b. In the last days before the outbreak of civil war, he noted as ominous the contempt shown towards Sir John Culpeper*, who bore a message from the king, the moves to expel Culpeper and a similar attempt by John Gurdon, ‘a hot, violent, ignorant man’ to have Henry Coke expelled.247PJ iii. 321, 323-4, 336; CJ ii. 740a. Although he had with some private qualms of unease affirmed support for the 3rd earl of Essex (Robert Devereux) (27 Aug.), he felt unable to watch Essex leave Parliament to take up his military command (9 Sept.), and considered a message drafted by one of Pym’s committees ‘insolent’.248PJ iii. 341-4, 357. He held Sir Henry Vane I in particular distaste, considering him a hypocrite who had waited to observe which side was strongest before throwing in his lot with Parliament.249PJ iii. 357. It has to be borne in mind not only that some of his hostile portraits of the war’s supporters in the House in these weeks were undoubtedly coloured by his alienation after 23 July – he observed smugly on 17 September that some members had told him they missed his expertise on records – but also that his analysis laid a full measure of blame at the door of the king for his reliance for too long on ‘the wicked prelates and other the looser and corrupter sort of the clergy’.250PJ iii. 342, 362. He had no doubt, either, that when war came it would be the king who lost the most: his people, his cities, his kingdom.251Harl. 379, f. 96.

Alienated Parliamentarian, 1642-3

It was almost inevitable that once the king’s standard had been raised, D’Ewes would find his position uncomfortable. It soon came to the attention of one of his political enemies in the House, Henry Marten, that he had a brother active in arms in the king’s cause, and Marten announced this to the Commons on 22 September. John Glynne and Henry Armyne were not satisfied with D’Ewes’s response, and he felt obliged then to offer a further £100 to the cause of Parliament. He received support from Sir Harbottle Grimston*, but his critics were not completely quelled, and his request for leave fell on stony ground.252Harl. 163, ff. 376, 381v, 382v. He still harboured a sense of alienation, not assuaged by the lukewarm response to his gesture. He thought the House was under ‘servitude’ to the radicals when no-one challenged the motion by Francis Rous that the mayor of Exeter should disarm those who refused the Militia Ordinance (27 Sept.), and when a pamphlet was published that warned the king that the fate of wicked kings in the Old Testament would befall him if he obstructed the godly, D’Ewes joined Oliver St John in denouncing it, while Marten, to D’Ewes’s disgust, could see no wrong in it.253Harl. 163, ff. 385v, 417v, 418v; A Speedy Post from Heaven (1642), 1 (E.121.6). He attended perfunctorily and without enthusiasm some of the open meetings of the Committee of Safety to hear from it whatever its members thought fit to impart, but deplored the shift of authority away from the whole House as business was shunted to the Committee ‘by a kind of fatality and blind faith’.254Harl. 164, ff. 9v, 10. On 8 October, when Miles Corbett began to identify Members who had not declared themselves on the Propositions, D’Ewes was first on his list, and in response he repeated his offer of 22 September. This time, with the support of Sir Gilbert Gerard, who as Parliament’s treasurer-at-war was a crucial supporter to have on his side, he secured his exeat.255Harl. 164, ff. 10, 12, 11v, 174v; CJ 803a. D’Ewes privately thought the Propositions unjustifiable, as taxation without parliamentary consent.256Harl. 164, f. 31v. He brought forward his visit to Suffolk, and by now was so unenamoured of the House that rainfall was enough to deter him from attending.257Harl. 164, ff. 31v, 38. He was there on 20 October, to hear Pym’s call for a new oath of loyalty, and it was not until 19 November that he appeared in the House again.258Harl. 164, ff. 38, 40, 56v.

D’Ewes’s first day back at work was traumatic. He was told by William Constantine* that his brother had been killed fighting for the king at Edgehill. By nightfall, the report had been proved false, but even so it must have informed his stance in favour of peace.259Harl. 164, f. 56v. Two days later (21 Nov.), he voted in favour of considering the king’s answer to a message of the House about a peace treaty, and was heartened by how Holles, Bulstrode Whitelocke, John Glynne and William Pierrepont were now for an accommodation, despite their having been against one when D’Ewes had spoken to foretell the miseries of civil war. The debate took place in the aftermath of Parliament’s check to the king’s army at Turnham Green, and was conditioned by Charles’s conduct afterwards, widely perceived at Westminster to have been duplicitous. Against the bulk of parliamentary opinion, D’Ewes found himself among a small group of six or seven calling in the committee of the whole House for a resumption of the debate the following day, which in the event passed by only one vote. On that occasion, D’Ewes broke his self-imposed rule since July of not speaking unless called upon to do so. He spoke in favour of the proposition to disband Parliament’s army along with the king’s. The proposal was crushed by the ‘fiery spirits’, and the vote, which D’Ewes thought ‘yielded up the kingdom to destruction’, plunged him into a renewed sense of impending disaster.260Harl. 164, ff. 99, 99v, 102, 102v, 106; Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, i. 61. It also deepened his alienation: evidenced by his arriving late and leaving after only an hour (24 Nov.); by his professed astonishment at ordinances like that for the ‘twentieth part’, which in his view pushed the legislative instrument of the ordinance well beyond its constitutional validity (23 Nov., 5 Dec.), and by his recording reports that Speaker Lenthall exaggerated his losses to plunder by three times their real value (1 Dec.).261Harl. 164, ff. 111, 131v, 175v, 243.

But once again, D’Ewes was drawn back into the business of the House. He had become a member of Laurence Whitaker’s* Committee for Examinations by 12 December 1642, when he spent an hour examining witnesses on how signatures were acquired for a petition in favour of an accommodation. Again defying his own pledge not to speak unless asked, he intervened the following day, when Samuel Browne rejected the procedure of examining people on oath in London in order to compel them to declare the value of their estates. D’Ewes spoke partly out of his sense of outrage, but also surely because of the tactical advantage to be gained for those seeking peace by this evident disagreement between those who supported a decisive war: Pym and others pleaded necessity, as against Browne’s defence of statute. The proposed oath, anathema to D’Ewes’s theological sensibilities, was in the event omitted.262Harl. 164, ff. 247v, 248, 248v. On 20 December, he took a number of messages to the Lords, among them an ordinance to exonerate MPs in Devon declared rebels by the king, another authorizing the raising of troops in Cambridgeshire, and a request for the upper House to expedite an order encouraging a military association in Northamptonshire.263CJ ii. 896b, 897a; LJ v. 503a,b. He recorded in his diary that this was the first time he had been selected for this particular task.264Harl. 164, ff. 267v, 268. Later that day, he was included in the committee preparing a response to the request of the Scots for the £40,000 arrears of money owing to them for their ‘brotherly assistance’. Although his purpose in joining this committee was to argue against allowing the Scots to take their money through seizures of delinquents’ estates, he was consistently in favour of the alliance, but the messages to the Lords concerned subjects on which he had expressed doubts, misgivings and anxieties.265CJ ii. 901b; Harl. 164, ff. 273v, 274. Presumably he had been galvanized by a feeling that he could now help the cause of peace by building alliances with sympathetic peers on the day they sent peace proposals to the Commons, but in the event it was a momentary burst of activity, as he was named to no further committees until 28 February 1643.

D’Ewes was emboldened enough to make a long and uncompromising speech on 22 December, another indication of his energy at that point. He argued for considering the peace proposals article by article, contradicting Sir Henry Vane II, who wanted them dismissed out of hand. In a curious inversion of the conspiracy theory which Pym had constructed since 1640, D’Ewes opined that the ills of the kingdom were attributable to the deceased French first minister of state, Cardinal Richelieu, and would soon themselves wither following the demise of their manufacturer. He went on to list the calamities facing towns, and the attendant horrors of civil war. He ventured beyond his convenient scapegoating of French foreign policy to outline a more plausible future in which Parliament’s alliance with the Scots would be countered by a royal pact with the Danes and the French. Afterwards, he reflected that had he delivered the speech around the time of his mobbing in July, he would have been sent to the Tower, indicating that he now sensed enough weakening in support for the war party to allow the advocates of peace to make headway.266Harl. 164, ff. 271-3. By the following day, he had decided that he had done everything he could to turn the House away from continuing with the war.267Harl. 164, f. 273. Undoubtedly, it was the Lords’ peace proposals that had energized D’Ewes, with his appreciation that powerful figures such as Holles, who had proposed him as messenger to the Lords, were coming over to his position; but his earlier political behaviour should not be characterised as torpor. From the start of the war he had, either in speeches or in the committees he attended in the afternoons, intervened in favour of those he considered victims of Parliament. Sir Sidney Montagu, the 2nd earl of Dunfermline (S.), the duke of Gelderland and Dr Clavell, the duke’s assistant, together with Sir Thomas Jermyn* were objects of D’Ewes’s advocacy in December 1642 alone.268Harl. 164, ff. 178v, 266v, 267, 270v, 274, 274v. By the same token, he sought to restrain successful parliamentarian commanders such as Sir John Gell in Derbyshire, fearing that he would plunder his father-in-law of two months’ standing, Sir Henry Willoughby. Such views marked him out as an opponent of the hardliners.269Harl. 164, ff. 264v, 265. In his own assessment, John Hampden was in January 1643 the ‘chief captain and ringleader’ of the fiery spirits; the ‘moderate, honest part’ of the Commons was for peace.270Harl. 164, f. 277v.

The impact that civil war made on D’Ewes’s political career is evident in the totals of committee appointments which included his name: 47 in 1642, but a mere 10 in 1643. His first nomination in 1643 (28 Feb.), a quasi-antiquarian one on the charter of London, was followed by a fallow period from then until 14 April.271CJ ii. 983b, iii. 44b. Some issues still attracted his enthusiasm, such as the new bill to abolish the church hierarchy, on which he found himself opposed to John Maynard*, a fellow promoter of peace but an advocate of leaving the existing structure intact until another were erected in its place. D’Ewes rejected such temporizing, arguing for swift abolition and the retention only of minimal tithing; only predial tithes, those arising directly from the produce of the land, could be justified; other kinds, including those based on the produce of labour, should be outlawed.272Harl. 164, ff. 276v, 279, 279v. The ordinance passed the Lords on 26 January, but D’Ewes noted the question some had raised over its legitimacy, since it had passed in a very thin Commons. Furthermore, the change in D’Ewes’s attitude is visible in his leaving the debate early on 17 January because he thought changes proposed to the ordinance would expedite its passage: the D’Ewes of a year earlier would surely not have been so disengaged.273Harl. 164, ff. 276v, 280, 282v. His instinct was always to allow the king the benefit of the doubt in a variety of matters that pitted the ‘fiery spirits’ against the peace party: on Ireland, where he wanted Leicester to take the expeditionary force, despite calls by Marten to withhold support as a bargaining tool; on keeping letters from the king private to the Houses, rather than releasing them for publication; on the strategy of intercepting royal correspondence, which he thought merely provocative.274Harl. 164, ff. 284, 285v, 286v. Apart from by his pronouncements, he set himself as standing against the war party by declaring on more than one occasion (22 Dec. 1642, 13 Jan., 1 Feb. 1643) that because his rental income had dried up, he was unable to contribute more to the parliamentary war-chest.275Harl. 164, ff. 271v, 275v, 287v.

In December 1642 and the first months of 1643, D’Ewes’s thoughts and speeches tended consistently to interpret the lesser items of parliamentary business as distractions from, and obstacles to, the pursuit of the peace propositions presented to the king at Oxford.276Harl. 164, ff. 274v, 291. He spoke to argue in favour of giving due consideration to the king’s answer to the propositions, when others such as John Gurdon and Sir Arthur Hesilrige opposed giving the answer any time, or rejected the value of constructing a response from both Houses.277Harl. 164, f. 291v. The loss of Cirencester to the royalists in February was a disaster which encouraged D’Ewes to promote the idea of a complete cessation of military activity as a precondition of a disbandment; in the circular arguments about the order in which cessation, disbandment and treaty should occur, even he had to concede that the king had to agree to a disbandment date before a mutual cessation could take place. On 10 February he unsuccessfully called for a vote on an immediate treaty.278Harl. 164, ff. 293, 293v, 294, 295. After he voted with Holles and (Sir) John Evelyn of Surrey in favour of a treaty on the propositions before any disbanding occurred (11 Feb.), and lost the division by 14 votes, he went home ‘fearing that the kingdom itself was lost with it’, because he and his allies recognized that disbanding before a treaty would be unacceptable to the king.279Harl. 164, ff. 295v, 296, 296v. Further clashes on the order of proceeding in the negotiations took place during the following week, in which D’Ewes contributed two speeches (17 Feb.) and was on the winning side in a division the following day, when Holles and Evelyn again told for the proponents of a cessation before the treaty.280Harl. 164, ff. 299v, 300v, 301v, 302v; CJ ii. 970b. He was sensitive to any insertion into the negotiations that made the treaty less achievable, such as Pym’s concern for arsenals (27 Feb.) or the vote approving Essex’s determination to march (9 Mar.), which D’Ewes regarded as purely provocative, since the lord general had been inactive for months.281Harl. 164, ff. 308v, 318v. On the other hand, he was hardly starry-eyed about the king’s counsellors. By early March at the latest, he was convinced that the men around the king at Oxford were every bit as uncompromising as the fiery spirits at Westminster, and he strongly doubted the integrity of some of them: Edward Hyde*, for example, he dismissed as of ‘little law and less honesty’, though the earlier hostility between the families of Hyde and D’Ewes undoubtedly coloured his judgment.282Harl. 164, ff. 314v, 329; McGee, Industrious Mind, 391.

D’Ewes’s views on the law, and on Parliament’s role in making and administering it, ensured that he was a constant critic of the dominant group in the Commons. Pym’s often-repeated insistence on necessity carried little weight with him. He inevitably courted unpopularity in his pronouncements, as when he voted against the construction of defences at Taunton because he thought the ordinance allowing the townspeople to impose a rate for the task unlawful (20 Feb.). He continued to draw a distinction between an act of Parliament and an ordinance of both Houses that the leaders, and probably most of the Members who favoured war however reluctantly, would no longer have recognized. Maintaining this distinction accounted for many of his verdicts, including the Taunton case and his disapproval of the seizure of a ship’s cargo in the Thames, ordered on an ordinance.283Harl. 164, ff. 302v, 303, 305. D’Ewes insisted that an ordinance should bind both Houses and other parties only voluntarily. It was therefore unsurprising that the sequestration ordinance brought in by John Wylde (27 Feb.) should have been to his mind ‘unjust and illegal’, the injustice lying in the imposition, but the unlawfulness inherent in the ordinance, too puny an instrument for taking away ‘goods and inheritances’.284Harl. 164, ff. 307v, 308, 315v, 316. When Wylde brought in the list of sequestration commissioners for each county (15 Mar.), D’Ewes was pleased that his name was missing from it, and claimed to have evidence supporting the prediction he and Maynard had made that the ordinance would simply provoke retaliation in kind by the king. He fruitlessly lobbied William Russell*, 5th earl of Bedford, and John Holles†, 2nd earl of Clare, brother of Denzil Holles, with amendments to the ordinance, which indicates that he was at least engaging with it rather than shunning it.285Harl. 164, ff. 330, 331, 345. But his initial response to money-raising ordinances or those that encroached on liberties was to reject them as unlawful: martial law (13 Mar.), the excise (although D’Ewes forebore from making a speech) (28 Mar.) and the extension of the assessment to the whole country (6 Apr.) were all illegal in his eyes.286Harl. 164, ff. 326, 326v, 346v, 347, 358v.

As the negotiations over the treaty proceeded, D’Ewes became increasingly inclined to interpret every action and argument of the fiery spirits as aimed at preventing a settlement. Pym’s disapproval of a separate treaty between the Cornish royalists and the Devon parliamentarians, in which (Sir) John Northcote was prominent, sprang, D’Ewes thought, from his disapproval of any peace anywhere, of any kind. Episodes such as the refusal to allow the custom of a gunfire salute at the Tower on the king’s accession day, and the expedition to Somerset House to attack ‘popish images’ at a time when negotiations were at a critical stage, were typical provocations.287Harl. 164, ff. 324, 343, 348v, 361v. He began to see in the Lords the best hope for a treaty, and was quick to note St John’s objections to what had emerged from the upper House as merely disruptive (11 Mar.). His hopes were raised a week later, after a conference with the Lords (18 Mar.), that not only was peace possible, but that a momentum towards peace was unstoppable, as five key peers now inclined to peace. The absence from the Commons of Sir Henry Vane II and John Hampden suggested to him that the fiery spirits concurred.288Harl. 164, ff. 323, 334. Holland and Pembroke had long been well known to him; his lobbying of Clare and Bedford has already been noted, and all these were important figures in the Lords peace group. He began to speak in the House in the interests of peers who had fallen foul of Parliament.289Harl. 164, ff. 344, 362, 362v. He spoke on the floor of the House on various occasions during the debates on the treaty, usually from his usual vantage point as guardian of historical precedent, for example rebutting Strode’s objections to allowing the king to retain the right of approving commanders of garrisons.290Harl. 164, ff. 334v, 335, 336. Generally, however, he stood aside from the mechanics of the negotiations, preferring in April to argue repeatedly for extending the deadline of the negotiations and doing what he could to lobby the earls of Holland and Pembroke.291Harl. 164, ff. 347v, 352, 352v, 360, 361, 361v, 364. In the closing days of the discussions, he and his friends in the Lords became despondent as they perceived that ‘violent spirits here and violent spirits at Oxford’ would prevail. Hopes of a settlement began to run out, but working towards a peace accounted for most of D’Ewes’s activity, and for the first time he contributed to the formal processes by serving as a reporter to the Commons on a conference about the treaty with the Lords (14 Apr.); but on that day the king’s final terms were declined by the Houses and the treaty was abandoned.292Harl. 164, ff. 361, 361v; CJ iii. 44b.

The D’Ewes of April 1643 onwards, after his hopes of peace were dashed, was even further detached from the centre of parliamentary business. He was still capable of making alliances with individuals, however. John Goodwyn* helped him to secure the summons of the House to an intruder on his estates in Dorset. Denis Bond* argued that the occupier of his land might have had good title, but the Commons agreed to treat it as a breach of privilege.293Harl. 164, f. 370; CJ iii. 47b. In return, D’Ewes supported Goodwyn’s motion on funding for Ireland (17 Apr.), and he was persuaded to join committees on the subject, including acting as a manager and reporter of a conference with the Lords.294Harl. 164, ff. 370v, 371; CJ iii. 53b, 56b. But for several months, he concentrated on recording the follies of the House in his diary, his excoriation of the fiery spirits deepening as he did so. Marten, for example, was by this time a ‘currish, uncivilized, untutored fellow’.295Harl. 164, f. 372v, 373. Nothing good, in his view, had come from the Committee of Safety, which he thought exaggerated the import of intercepted royal correspondence and had wrecked the Oxford peace proposals; it was the main engine of war.296Harl. 164, ff. 311v, 364. It had been a puzzle to him that Marten had wanted to abolish the Committee, since he was member of it; D’Ewes was unable to recognize that by late 1642, the Committee was not the vehicle for the most extreme hostility to the king that he continued to consider it to be.297Harl. 165, f. 297v.; 'Committee of Safety', supra. But he himself was not consistently hostile to powerful parliamentary committees. He had been an active member of the Committee for Examinations, when Laurence Whitaker chaired it under its alternative title of Committee of Informations. When abuses in Kent were reported to the Commons and were shown to have arisen from a writ procured by Anthony Nicoll* from the Committee of Safety, D’Ewes successfully moved to have Nicoll questioned. He must have taken satisfaction from the order that the Committee of Safety’s books should be examined by the Committee for Examinations (20 Apr.).298Harl. 165, ff. 375, 375v; CJ iii. 53a,b.

Any pleasure D’Ewes took in the proceedings in the House on 20 April was almost immediately completely effaced, since the following day his brother died as a result of wounds sustained in fighting at Reading. On 4 May he acquired a narrative of Richard’s death from a minister, and inserted it into his diary under the entry for 21 April. 299Harl. 165, f. 377; McGee, Industrious Mind, 391. This event was to have a direct bearing on D’Ewes’s parliamentary career. On 10 May, one of his long-standing enemies, John Gurdon, alleged in the House that D’Ewes’s brother had left a sum of up to £5,000 to the wife of a royalist delinquent. D’Ewes was mortified at the ‘barbarous and unjust’ allegation, and pondered on the friendship that had once flourished between his family and Brampton Gurdon*, John Gurdon’s father. The younger Gurdon saw things differently, and pressed home the attack, declaring himself sure that Richard D’Ewes had ‘died a traitor to the Parliament’.300Harl. 164, ff. 386v, 387, 387v. The upshot was that D’Ewes had to appear before another of the committees he thought unjust and illegal, and on 12 May handed over his brother’s will to John Wylde at the Committee for Sequestrations. He hoped for help from his friends there, including the 2nd earl of Manchester (Edward Montagu†) and the earl of Holland, the latter certainly intervening on D’Ewes’s side. After the hearing, he left for the country until 23 May.301Harl. 164, ff. 390, 390v; CJ iii. 80a. Despite the efforts of D’Ewes’s friends in high places, however, Gurdon did not desist, and on 2 June renewed the assault, abetted by Denis Bond. The case against him was not substantiated, but D’Ewes had to wait until early August to score a point against Gurdon in an exchange of speeches over peace.302Harl. 165, ff. 96, 96v, 138v, 139, 140v. In due course, D’Ewes was to commemorate his brother by building an almshouse in his memory at Stowlangtoft.303Bodl. Tanner 226, p.50.

Naturally, this episode did nothing to inspire in D’Ewes more collegial sentiments in respect of the House of Commons. Even before the attack on him by Gurdon, D’Ewes had come to suspect a conspiracy concocted by the fiery spirits in Parliament and the money-men and radicals of the City. On 27 April, he noted how a speech by Sir Henry Vane II before the City was asked for a loan included a request for executive power to ‘remove obstructions’ if their merchant friends demanded such action. D’Ewes took this to be a scheme for a new loyalty oath, a deliberate revival of Pym’s failed plan of October 1642 for such a pledge. To his own mind at least, he was proved correct, but he stuck to his view that such a device was ‘a dangerous and ungodly snare’.304Harl. 164, ff. 380, 380v, 381. A similar unjustifiable innovation was Parliament’s creation of its own great seal, ‘against all precedent either in record or story’.305Harl. 164, f. 387v. In at least one speech opposing the plan for a great seal, D’Ewes attributed to detractors of Parliament the rumour that the House was intent on exploiting the Lords only while they were useful, and in the long run intended rule by a supreme committee; there seems little doubt that this was in fact his own view of the political situation at Westminster.306Harl. 164, ff. 388, 388v. Because of his belief in Pym’s capacity to manipulate events to suit a master plan, D’Ewes was sceptical about the threat posed by Waller’s plot. Edmund Waller himself, whom he had once dismissed as a callow lightweight, he now saw as ‘a gentleman of excellent parts’.307Harl. 164, f. 388v. He was indignant that Pym’s calculated exposure of the plot, to impact on public opinion in the City, disrupted the fast day on 31 May, and he regarded Pym’s strategy as pure hypocrisy, since he announced as an emergency something he had known about for days.308Harl. 164, ff. 210, 210v, 391, 396, 396v. His own speech in favour of renewing the Protestation, because it was not ‘an absolute oath’, was unsuccessful, and the House adopted the vow and covenant instead, a culmination, as D’Ewes perceived it, of Pym’s long-nurtured plan.309Harl. 164, ff. 399, 399v. He managed to square the new covenant with his conscience sufficiently to subscribe it, but made a number of speeches that summer against ‘unnecessary oaths’.310CJ iii. 118a; Harl. 165, ff. 128v, 129, 151v.

The impeachment articles against the queen that Pym took to the Lords in May 1643 marked for D’Ewes another descent into political ruin. He tried to comfort himself that some war party peers found the impeachment ‘unseasonable’, but the event persuaded him that the sword alone could settle the issues between king and Parliament, with only destructive consequences.311Harl. 164, ff. 390v, 391. He himself was included in the committee for managing the queen’s impeachment, but refused to act, ‘distrusting the business’.312CJ iii. 100b; Harl. 165, f. 110v. He resolved in June to continue his diaries partly to record ‘the very secret workings and machinations of each party as well as of the two Houses of Parliament chiefly led and guided by some few members of either house as of the king’s party’: in other words, he from this point onwards considered himself to be recording plotting and folly, which should be borne in mind by readers of his journals.313Harl. 165, f. 93. In this mood of cynicism, he characterised a scheme to safeguard London’s coal supplies from Newcastle-upon-Tyne (30 May) as partly a gift to new ‘projectors’ such as Squier Bence*, and partly a bromide to the London crowd, a sop to prevent them demanding peace. In similar vein, he thought the commanders of Essex’s army wanted to lengthen the war so that they would continue to receive their ‘great and continual pay’.314Harl. 165, ff. 209v, 233v. Despite these simplicities, his perspective on European affairs remained more statesmanlike than that of some of his more radical opponents. He remained loyal to the queen of Bohemia, supporting Pym in his motion to offer her some financial support at The Hague (22 June). Marten wanted to visit upon her some retaliation for the actions of one of her sons, Prince Rupert, but D’Ewes praised her piety and the fidelity to Parliament of another of her sons, Charles Louis, the object of so much of his own unofficial diplomatic effort.315Harl. 165, ff. 114v, 115.

Despite his willingness to believe the best of Waller, and his refusal to trust Pym, D’Ewes was obliged to revise his opinion on the plot, once Waller had confessed. He argued for his immediate disablement from sitting further (29 June), against those like John Glynne who wanted to hear Waller speak first.316Harl. 165, f. 102v. The House followed D’Ewes in this new uncompromising attitude towards Waller, and he also gathered support in the Commons for his view of the Newcastle Adventurers’ scheme as a concealed monopoly. Enough of the Lords agreed with him to block the legislation from progressing.317Harl. 165, ff. 120v, 121, 121v; CJ iii. 170a, LJ vi. 143a. The ordinance for Newcastle had been managed by Miles Corbett, who had by this time joined D’Ewes’s lengthening list of bêtes noires. D’Ewes deliberately sabotaged a meeting of the Committee for Examinations, chaired by Corbett, by persuading the Speaker to summon the committee to the chamber.318Harl. 165, f. 105v. He was rather reduced to this kind of behaviour on occasion, since his influence was evidently limited. On 8 July he made a speech in favour of peace, expecting to be supported by William Pierrepont, Sir John Evelyn and Denzil Holles, but none spoke to second him. He later discovered from Holles’s brother, the earl of Clare, that the peace party had expected the Lords to vote to send peace proposals to the king, but this had come to naught, and no-one had told D’Ewes.319Harl. 165, ff. 124-5. This despite his regular conversations with the earls of Holland, Pembroke and Bedford.320E.g. Harl. 165, ff. 134v, 138, 156-7. He wrote bitterly in his diary about what he saw as the bravado surrounding the call by ‘imposters’ such as Marten for a general rising in the summer, and recorded 7 August as ‘one of the saddest days’ of the Parliament because he believed the report by Pym and other ‘violent spirits’, that if peace proposals went ahead the leading politicians in favour of peace would be kidnapped, to be pure invention on their part.321Harl. 165, ff. 128, 128v, 145, 145v. Although he thought that Pym and St John were happy to see the crowds milling around Parliament on 7 August, he noted that the women outside the chamber allowed him to pass when he told them he was for peace. Soon afterwards, they were in his words ‘hunted ... down’ at Pym’s instigation.322Harl. 165, ff. 146, 150.

Further evidence of D’Ewes’s more self-conscious recording of events in his journal from the summer of 1643 lies in his revisiting of it later to ante-date the rise of the Independents. Lord Saye and Sele (William Fiennes) is described on 25 August as ‘a prime Independent’, and the same passage records a conversation between the earl of Essex and the leaders of the Commons that must have been written after September 1644.323Harl. 165, ff. 157v, 179. Needless to say that D’Ewes disapproved strongly of the Independents, but he now glimpsed in the Scots a prospect of some improvement in public affairs, a shift in his own thinking at a time of wider factional reorientation in Parliament. He maintained his aloofness from the Committee for Plundered Ministers, and voted against all the orders reported by John White II for ejecting ministers in London (22 Aug. 1643), ostensibly because they took insufficient care of the innocent families of the clergy in question.324Harl. 165, ff. 154, 154v. Four days later, in a debate on the projected Solemn League and Covenant, he queried whether the Parliament should accept the inference by the Scots that their church was more perfectly reformed according to the word of God than that of the English. He welcomed the clauses for suppressing sins and heresies nevertheless.325Harl. 165, ff. 158v, 159. Although he revisited this passage in 1647, he was without doubt at the time in favour of incorporating Ireland entirely within the scope of the Covenant, as that kingdom continued to be a political interest of his. On 5 September he himself proposed a collection in south-east England for distressed Protestant ministers arriving from Ireland; Humphrey Salway* was to bring in the ordinance, and D’Ewes served on the committee, taking the legislation successfully to the Lords on the 18th.326Harl. 165, ff. 163v, 164, 166v, 167; CJ iii. 228a, 245b; LJ vi. 219a, 246a. There is no question but that it passed owing to D’Ewes’s diligence and persistence.327Harl. 165, ff. 195, 195v, 196. The passing of this ordinance coincided with the adoption of the Covenant. D’Ewes’s objections to oaths, on grounds of legal precedent as well as for theological reasons, were regarded as noteworthy by other Members, such as Laurence Whitaker*, but in fact he approved of this particular loyalty test.328Add. 31116, p. 141. While he recorded how some, like James Fiennes*, scrupled taking it, provoking Sir Anthony Irby* into proposing expulsions, he himself regarded it as the ‘chief means under heaven for the preserving of the outward happiness of this kingdom’.329Harl. 165, ff. 222, 222v. The House concurred with his own proposal that the handful of refusers of the Covenant should be suspended from membership rather than expelled.330Harl. 165, f. 223; CJ iii. 302b. By the end of the year he was in favour of excluding those who refused the Covenant from standing in City elections, even though he was willing to allow the benefit of the doubt to suspected royalists.331Harl. 165, f. 249v.

Making alliances 1643-5

It was probably his enthusiasm for the Covenant – an accompanying letter from the Scottish general assembly ‘drew hot tears or tears of joy’ from his eyes – that accounts for D’Ewes’s renewed commitment, albeit on a limited scale, to participating in parliamentary affairs.332Harl. 165, f. 177v. He was named to six committees between October and the end of 1643, half of them on topics he had long involved himself with: against antinomianism (10 Oct.), against scandalous clergy (12 Dec.) and on the preservation of records at buildings in London and Westminster being used by Parliament (2 Nov.).333CJ iii. 271b, 298b, 338b. Part of his interest in the last-named was personal, as he was concerned to secure his own father’s library, which had come to be located in the house of the dean of Westminster. On this occasion, the driving force behind the ordinance was Selden, who also served with D’Ewes on the bill on scandalous clergy. D’Ewes was motivated enough to insist on amendments to the ordinance for Plymouth (11 Nov.).334Harl. 165, ff. 202, 225v, 226v. He found precedents to help Prynne and Clement Walker* (15 Nov.) in their prosecution of Nathaniel Fiennes I for surrendering Bristol.335Add. 31116, p. 183. Meanwhile, however, he had to look on helplessly as one of his key allies in the Lords, the earl of Holland, fell victim to an attack by Gurdon and other war party men for visiting Oxford. Contrary to D’Ewes’s expectation, the Commons voted to ask the Lords to send the earl to the Tower, and when the earl of Pembroke took Holland’s examination, D’Ewes was at the back of the room, unable to hear. In the event, however, one of his speeches turned the tide, and the House was content to leave the Lords to punish Holland as they saw fit. Even so, Holland remained excluded from the House of Lords, a significant setback for D’Ewes too.336Harl. 165, ff. 223v, 224, 224v, 228v-229v; LJ vi. 340b. In March 1644, he was naturally supportive of moves to lift Holland’s sequestration, calling the earl’s foray to Oxford an ‘ill means to a good end’, motivated by a desire to secure peace.337Harl. 165, ff. 32v, 33.

D’Ewes’s faith in the Scots extended to a willingness to trust their capacity for subduing the Irish, as well as a confidence in their system of church government and a belief in the Covenant as ‘one of the last means left for our preservation’.338Harl. 165, ff. 249v, 255. Yet he did not see himself as a member of a pro-Scots faction in the House. When he discussed the party structure of the Commons with Thomas Erle* on 6 December, they agreed that the friends of the Scots were led by Sir Henry Vane II and the northern English victims of the royalist William Cavendish†,1st earl of Newcastle; and that the other factions were supporters of regional military associations who focused their loyalty on Sir William Waller*, or partisans for the earl of Essex, led by Stapilton.339Harl. 165, ff. 233, 233v. While this was doubtless insightful, it left out of account those like D’Ewes himself who were not supporters of any military solution to the country’s problems, and it needs to be viewed in the light of D’Ewes’s conscious adoption of cynicism in analysing domestic politics. His speech of 18 December, in support of the 2nd earl of Denbigh (Basil Feilding), the subject of an attack by William Purefoy I* and others of the Coventry committee, revealed the extent to which D’Ewes was by this time analysing regional politics in terms of competing power rivalries, but his defence of Denbigh was based on his assertion that he had ‘long known him’.340Harl. 165, f. 247v. D’Ewes was more consistent and single-minded in his promotion of a pan-European Protestant alliance. He was keen on the Dutch as potential allies of the English and Scots, and did what he could to steer politicians more influential than himself, such as Oliver St John, away from offending the states general.341Harl. 165, f. 232v.

The most obvious beneficiary of D’Ewes’s Protestant vision was the prince elector, whose cause he continued to assist whenever an opportunity arose. In March 1644 he successfully proposed a revival of the committee on the subject, and was delighted at the prince’s approval of the Covenant. He reported from the committee on 3 April, and was subsequently able to announce to the prince an award from the Commons of £3,000.342CJ iii. 437b, 439a, 446a, 449a, 451a; LJ vi. 501b; Harl. 166, ff. 23v, 40v, 44, 45, 47v; Harl. 483, f. 36v. By contrast, his other long-term client, Egmont, was no Protestant, but neither was he a ‘papist’ in the way that D’Ewes would have defined the term, and he supported Egmont’s attempts at moving freely in Europe to recover his fortunes.343Harl. 165, ff. 172, 214v, 217v, 249. In April 1644 he defended Egmont against an attack by Sir Walter Erle*, assuring Erle that Egmont, though a Catholic, hated ‘Jesuits and the Spanish faction’.344Harl. 166, f. 49. Another Catholic who benefited from his intervention was the exiled Charles, duke of Lorraine, whose ambassador D’Ewes defended against charges by vehement anti-popish elements in the Commons. Anthony Fortescue, the ambassador, was alleged to have harboured a priest, and D’Ewes helped clear him (16 Oct. 1644), although Fortescue was then required to leave the country.345Harl. 166, ff. 149v, 150; CJ iii. 667a. All of these lame ducks that D’Ewes helped were in the contexts of their own territories opponents or victims either of the Holy Roman Empire or of expansionist France under Richelieu. He would have regarded his own involvement in taking letters from the king of Denmark, on trade matters, from the Commons to the Lords (3 June 1644) as being in the interests of Protestant solidarity.346Harl. 166, f. 69; CJ iii. 516b, 577b; LJ vi. 578b.

D’Ewes never lost sight of the interests of the scholarly community. He was critical of plans to intrude Members of the Commons into educational posts because they encroached on what he felt should remain the preserve of scholars. It was on these grounds that he opposed the ordinance appointing Francis Rous* to the mastership of Eton (3 Feb. 1644). However, as a published writer on theological subjects, Rous was a credible candidate, and so D’Ewes’s objections may well in fact have been grounded in distaste for Rous’s political associations.347Harl. 166, f. 6v. D’Ewes was prominent in efforts to lift the sequestration from Cambridge University, drawing attention to links between Trinity College and Westminster School as a source of young scholars. Working closely with Selden, he drafted parts of the order lifting the sequestration (3 Jan. 1644), still critical of how much control over university revenues had been ceded to the earl of Manchester.348Harl. 166, ff. 240-241v, 267, 267v, 268; CJ iii. 357b, 358a; Harl. 483, f. 14. He managed to maintain his own scholarly interests, working regularly on the pedigrees of families that interested him or to which he was somehow related.349Harl. 483, Harl. 484. He complained in December 1643 that he had not been to his home in Suffolk for more than eight days in three years, so in 1644 had his coin collection brought down to London from Stowlangtoft, and from January 1645 this became another welcome distraction.350Harl. 165, f. 242v; Harl. 483, f. 163. His numismatic interests expanded as the hours he spent in the House from 1645 onwards reduced. In 1644, however, he was still an active Member. He remained a regular participant in meetings of the Committee for Examinations and, after making a speech on timber supplies (14 Feb.) seeking to call to account the Committee of Navy and Customs, was named a member of it, although only as to this particular business.351CJ iii. 398b, 399b; Harl. 166, ff. 1,1v. Otherwise, his frequent attendances at afternoon sittings of committees were generally in support of people who had been brought before them as subjects of proceedings. He took advantage of Members’ rights to attend any committee meetings, and was a vocal opponent of the oath of secrecy that the promoters of the Committee of Both Kingdoms sought to introduce.352Harl. 166, f. 19. The Committees for Examinations, Sequestrations, Plundered Ministers and the committee on the case of the earl of Denbigh saw much of D’Ewes as an advocate during 1644, all of them arenas where he tried to help those he described in his Latin diary as ‘wretched victims’.353Harl. 483, f. 73v for 'wretched victims' (constitutos ut miseris); further examples at ff. 4v, 9, 49v, 57v, 59v-60, 61.

It was characteristic of D’Ewes to ascribe the quarrel between the supporters respectively of Essex and Waller as generated by ‘some evil instruments on both sides’.354Harl. 165, f. 266. This typical distancing device concealed his own evident loyalty to the Essex group, despite his preference for an immediate peace. Though in November 1643 he opposed any talk of expanding Essex’s army, he backed Sir Henry Mildmay* in supporting Essex against war party critics (13 Feb. 1644), and hoped a deal could be struck between Essex and the Scots, whereby Scottish envoys could bring peace proposals to Westminster, a more favourable outcome in D’Ewes’s eyes than a fresh sequestration ordinance to support Waller’s army. He was disappointed to learn on 2 March that the Scottish army, which he saw as a deus ex machina to back up new peace proposals, had not yet ventured south of the Tyne.355Harl. 166, ff. 3, 3v, 14v, 16v, 21. Despite his willingness usually to see the best in the king’s behaviour, he was not displeased to learn of what he considered Charles’s undignified efforts to scrape funds together to repel the Scots, and spoke in favour of supplying Essex’s army (20 Mar.) rather than joining the critics who would have preferred to keep it short of money.356Harl. 166, ff. 32, 36. He considered the treasurer of Essex’s army, Sir Gilbert Gerard*, his ‘very faithful friend and a real, honest man’, and he took the ‘honest party’ in the Essex-Waller quarrel to be those around Holles and Sir Walter Erle who opposed Sir Henry Vane II’s policy of detaining Waller from following Essex to the south west in July.357Harl. 165, f. 255v, Harl. 166, f. 98v. He reacted with impatience against the ‘tedious and slow’ response of the Commons at the end of August in the face of news of the impending fate of Essex in the south western peninsula.358Harl. 166, f. 110v. Even after the disaster at Lostwithiel, D’Ewes, like Holles, argued not to discredit the lord general but in favour of a re-launch of an army under him, D’Ewes going so far as to assert in a speech on 21 September that he ‘ever thought [Essex] would have been victorious in the west’.359Harl. 166, ff. 123v, 124.

When from the spring of 1644 renewed discussions took place in the Commons about peace, D’Ewes was quickly disappointed. He would have expected opposition from the likes of Sir Henry Vane II, and would have endorsed the view of Holles that English politicians hostile to peace would by chicanery try to sow confusion and misunderstanding between the positions of Scots and English negotiators, but he was downcast at the general ‘high and terrible’ tenor of what were to become the proposals tabled at Uxbridge.360Harl. 166, ff. 53v, 54v, 55; Harl. 483, f. 61. He deplored the renewal of legislation to continue the Committee of Both Kingdoms in May 1644, which he recorded as having been pushed through a thin Commons by proponents such as Vane II, and portrayed the Committee as the engine by which any prospect of peace would be scuppered. He sought to gratify the Lords by expanding the membership of the Committee from that House, but the proposal was voted down. 361Harl. 166, ff. 58v, 61. D’Ewes refused to believe that the Committee acted in good faith in regard to the peace proposals, viewing its courting of City interests and its programme of punitive tax measures such as the excise as all aimed at intensifying the civil war, not ending it.362Harl. 166, ff. 55, 62, 64v. D’Ewes resisted development of the excise as destructive both of trade and of individual families, even though he was named to the committee on it (15 June). On 27 July he recorded part of a text of a speech delivered ‘extempore or on a sudden’, which he may have intended for publication. It argued from historical precedent that light and restricted fines rather than heavy and punitive penalties on delinquents would be more likely to preserve the kingdom.363CJ iii. 531b; Harl. 166, ff. 73v, 101-3. As for the peace proposals themselves, he was included in the Commons committee that drew up the headings, but they were in his eyes by mid-August ‘dreadful’, particularly when they identified the Princes Rupert and Maurice among those who would be excluded from pardon. Unlike many of his colleagues, perhaps, he found it inconceivable that the death penalty might be visited upon two ‘free princes of Germany’.364CJ iii. 594a; Harl. 166, ff. 107v, 108. His speech urging their exemption from the list of exclusions from indemnity (26 Sept.) was unsuccessful.365Harl. 166, f. 125. He was named to the committee with the Lords (16 Dec.) to receive the king’s answer to the Uxbridge propositions, but was unsurprised at the complete breakdown in discussions.366CJ iii. 725b.

In the second half of 1644, D’Ewes was active in promoting the visit of ambassadors from the Netherlands, identifying in them some hope of mediation between king and Parliament. His hopes of the foreign delegation doubtless rose as his faith in the peace proposals being debated at Westminster ebbed, especially since one of the envoys was his friend of very long standing, Sir Albertus Joachimi. D’Ewes was named to committees on how to receive the ambassadors (6 July), and on how to satisfy their complaints about the detention of Dutch shipping (24 July, 16 Aug.).367CJ iii. 552b, 568a, 593a; LJ vi. 675a. The long-serving parliamentary envoy to the Dutch, Walter Strickland*, joined St John and Vane II in being critical of the Netherlanders’ motives, but D’Ewes vindicated the ambassadors as men of ‘wisdom, integrity and learning’ (24 July), and spoke in support of their position.368Harl. 166, ff. 100, 100v; Harl. 483, ff. 95, 99. According to his own account, his speech of 20 August was significant in persuading the House to persist with these talks, and he was given a role in looking after the visitors.369Harl. 483, ff. 108v, 109, 110. He was still attending the committee in mid-September, but began to expect failure, and recorded the difficulties encountered.370Harl. 483, ff. 119v, 120v. As the year ended, mutual irritation was visible on both sides, and at a private reception for the envoys (8 Jan. 1645), D’Ewes did what he could to smooth their ruffled feathers.371Harl. 483, ff. 151v, 162v. The friendship between D’Ewes and the prince elector was almost as time-honoured as the one he cherished with Joachimi, and D’Ewes looked forward to the arrival of Charles Louis in England in August 1644. D’Ewes served on the committee for the visit, and spoke in the interests of the prince on 29 August. The committee’s formulation of a letter to him two days later was ‘almost inhumane’ in D’Ewes’s eyes, however, as the members failed to draw a sharp enough distinction between the merits of Charles Louis and the demerits of his royalist grandee brothers, and D’Ewes withdrew.372CJ iii. 612b; Harl. 166, ff. 111, 111v. His frustration at this coolness on the part of his colleagues was compounded by the nonchalance of the prince, who showed no inclination to make D’Ewes his closest confidant. It was yet another disappointment, compelling D’Ewes to reflect on the true value of the frequent despatches he had been sending the prince through 1644, no fewer than three in one week in July.373Harl. 483, ff. 63v, 64v, 66, 74, 80, 82v, 87, 94, 99, 99v, 103v, 112, 112v, 113v, 114.

The evidence of D’Ewes’s diaries suggests that he drew closer to the earl of Holland after the rehabilitation of the peer in March 1644. The two met on various occasions in the early months of 1644, sometimes at Holland’s London house. It was from Holland that D’Ewes heard that Oliver Cromwell was packing Manchester’s army with Independents, and that there were 30,000 Independents and Baptists in London. D’Ewes evidently gave credence to these reports.374Harl. 483, ff. 12, 12v, 13, 55, 55v. Holland’s influence may therefore have been significant in sharpening D’Ewes’s perceptions of the rise of the Independents as a faction. He was a correspondent of the earl of Manchester in the same period, and a dining partner of the earl of Clare, not long returned from a temporary defection to Oxford and still under a cloud of suspicion at Westminster.375Harl. 483, ff. 9v, 13, 13v, 21v, 22, 62, 68v, 76, 95v, 96, 97. He evidently considered the division between the Houses on whether Manchester should have a command independent from that of Essex to be largely manufactured by the violent spirits, and sought to reconcile the factions, as one with powerful friends in the Lords.376Harl. 166, f. 55v. Other associates included the decidedly politically ambivalent Carew Ralegh* and the king’s physician, Sir Theodore Mayerne, with whom he discussed in July 1644 what they both considered the deplorable way in which the queen had been obliged to leave Exeter after giving birth.377Harl. 483, ff. 96, 111v. He was as scandalized by this as he had been delighted at the ringing of bells in Westminster to mark Prince Charles’s birthday (29 May).378Harl. 483, f. 74, 74v. His social circle outside the Commons must have reinforced his prejudices against the Independents and their associates. His view of Speaker Lenthall as a ‘true pickthank and time-pleaser’ (sycophant and time-server); of ‘proud, corrupt’ Edmund Prideaux I; of Henry Pelham* in June 1644 as venal – ‘perhaps bribes stuck in his teeth’ – and of John Lisle* as a plotter attempting in October that year to fix by-elections all suggest the extent to which D’Ewes was now as subject to side-taking as anyone in the House.379Harl. 166, ff. 43, 76v, 79v, 149. He particularly associated himself with his old friend Basil Feilding, 2nd earl of Denbigh, in the peer’s fight against the radicals of the west midlands. D’Ewes was named to the committee of both Houses on this subject (21 Aug. 1644), and he spoke to try to vindicate Denbigh from the attacks made on him in the Commons.380CJ iii. 602a; Harl. 166, ff. 11v, 160. He regarded himself as honour-bound to help Denbigh, and in the last four months of 1644 invested a great deal of time and effort at the committee as an advocate for the earl.381Harl. 483, ff. 114v, 115v, 121v, 123, 127v, 130, 131v, 132v, 133, 134, 135, 135v, 136, 137, 138, 138v, 140, 144, 149, 149v.

By the end of 1644, D’Ewes had become an afternoon parliamentarian, in the sense that his most significant contributions were being offered in the committees, which met after 2 pm. Between the start of July that year and the end of October, he was on average spending just under three hours a day in the chamber itself, typically making several entrances and exits each day. The 30 committees in 1644 against which the Journal records his name included those on petitions from London ship-owners (19 June), from a Hull landowner claiming compensation for damage suffered when the town defences were improved (16 Aug.), on regulating the flow of petitions through the House (3 Oct); and from the Eastern Association asking that excise and sequestration revenues should be allocated for the war effort in East Anglia (8 Oct.).382CJ iii. 534a, 591b, 649b, 655b. He attended others on which the official record is silent as to his participation, such as the committee on cloth exports (23, 26, 30 May, 4 June).383Harl. 483, ff. 72, 73, 75, 78; CJ iii. 518a. He no longer recorded his own zeal for religious reform as being a motivating force, and indeed saw little or no progress towards a settlement of the church. A typical fate that befell his initiatives was when on 24 April he moved for an ordinance against sexual immorality, only to have it ridiculed by the Speaker. This naturally drew a reproof from D’Ewes, but his motion got no further.384Harl. 166, f. 52. In the face of these discouragements, his diary activity in English by the end of 1644 had become thinner, scrappier and increasingly filled with transcripts of letters presented to the Speaker. His Latin diaries from 1644 to some extent indicate shifting priorities, as they record punctiliously the antiquarian pursuits and the pious observances, such as the four sermons in one day he attended in September 1645.385Harl. 484, f. 30v.

Nevertheless, he continued to be called to committees on religion. D’Ewes was named to committees on bills for better sabbath observance, to abolish superstitious worship (29 Mar., 27 Apr. 1644) and on whether a trial should be arranged for Archbishop Laud (14 Sept).386CJ iii. 440b, 470b, 628a. He was named second in the list of those deciding whether a Greek Bible in the royal library should be printed (3 Jan. 1645) and to the committee on a bill to suppress incest, adultery and other moral offences (29 Jan.).387CJ iv. 9a, 35b. All these topics were subject to the stalemate induced by factional dispute. At the second reading of the bill on the sabbath, D’Ewes clashed with Gurdon, who wanted fast days treated as a Sunday was, but D’Ewes rejected the analogy with the Jewish sabbath, insisting on the Lord’s Day as consisting of a single day of the week with religious duties, and having a separate, Christian, theological justification.388Harl. 166, f. 40v. It was on a motion by D’Ewes that Sir Robert Harley’s committee on removing superstitious monuments was revived (8 May 1644), even though as an antiquary D’Ewes continued to harbour concerns for the fate of ancient memorials. His purchase in May 1643 of a book ‘with popish pictures in it’, an ambivalent entry in his Latin diary recording his inspection of an altar-cloth at the Chapel Royal (30 May 1644) and his further confrontation with Gurdon (15 Oct.) to oppose the plan to sell the king’s plate, suggest how acutely he was aware of the conflict within himself between aesthetic and iconoclastic impulses.389A.G. Watson, The Library of Sir Simonds D'Ewes (1966), 258; Harl. 483, f. 75, Harl. 166, f. 149. He was capable of a stubborn resistance to concessions to the political imperative, as when he opposed deploying investment income, which he considered usurious, to support garrisons. He was an attentive auditor at fast sermons and other preaching before the Commons, but found no seconder to his motion on 22 October that time should be set aside to reflect on what the visiting preachers had delivered, noting sourly that ‘so a good motion died, as is the usual custom’.390Harl. 166, ff. 63v, 154. He did however secure a recommital of an ordinance that would have made it illegal to expound the scriptures in any house (4 Nov.). This was a unambiguous attack on sectaries, which D’Ewes might have been expected to endorse, but he wanted to restrict the ban to preaching in public places, affirming his belief that ‘the persecuting church was the malignant church and the persecuted church maintains the truth’.391Harl. 166, f. 152v.

Inevitably, given his hostility to the Independents, D’Ewes was out of sympathy with the creation of the new army under Sir Thomas Fairfax*. He continued vocally to support the aristocratic commanders aligned with Essex, such as Thomas Grey*, Lord Grey of Groby, and the earls of Manchester and Denbigh, and saw the manoeuvrings in October 1644 on behalf of Sir William Waller as ‘knavish packing’ by Independents such as Vane II and St John.392Harl. 166, ff. 91, 128v; Harl. 483, f. 98v; CJ iii. 567b. He supported the Essexians Sir Philip Stapilton, Denzil Holles, Sir John Clotworthy and Sir Gilbert Gerard in favour of re-employing the army officer John Dalbier, implicated in the surrender at Lostwithiel, losing a division of the House to Dalbier’s enemies among the Independents (21 Oct.).393Harl. 166, f. 154; CJ iii. 672b. Days later, he decided a petition from the City in favour of the Self-Denying Ordinance was ‘seditious’, unsuccessfully arguing that the petition was inherently a breach of parliamentary privilege and should not even be received by the Commons.394Harl. 166, f. 151. Sometimes D’Ewes deliberately stayed away from the House because he was sure the parliamentary day would end in an outcome which he deplored. He did so on 3 September 1644, to abstain from a debate on heavier direct taxation in England to fund an army in Ireland, and he did so again on 28 February 1645 to avoid the hot debate over the composition of the New Model officer cadre.395Harl. 483, f. 155; Harl. 166, f. 180v. This did not prevent him from intervening to try to block the appointment of Nathaniel Rich*, an Independent, to a command over Sir Robert Pye II*, a Presbyterian, seemingly arguing that Pye had seniority on his side. The promotion of Rich was only temporarily thwarted by this.396Harl. 166, ff. 180v, 181.

The year 1645 saw a sharp decline in D’Ewes’s committee appointments in the Commons, from 30 in 1644 to a mere 9. This reduction in fresh nominations concealed his continuing participation in committees that had been launched earlier in the Parliament, sometimes years earlier. An example is the committee on the sexual outrages perpetrated by John Griffith II*, to which D’Ewes was first called in June 1642. The committee was given renewed purpose, as was D’Ewes himself, by fresh allegations, this time by Griffith himself, that he had slept with Lady Herbert, wife of Philip, Lord Herbert*, in order to avenge himself on the prince elector, who had made Griffith procure the lady for him. In December 1644, D’Ewes, Denbigh and Charles Louis met privately to ponder the case, the diarist noting smugly in his Latin diary how the three sat with heads uncovered, the Commons-man on a par with the prince and the peer.397Harl. 483, ff. 149, 149v. Naturally, D’Ewes did everything he could to free Charles Louis from the calumny, and argued before his Commons colleagues (5 Apr. 1645) that in any other country Griffith would be hanged for his crimes.398CJ ii. 613a,b; Harl. 166, f. 198v; Harl. 483, ff. 191v, 192. Also in April, D’Ewes was called to the committee on an additional ordinance for taking the accounts of the kingdom, even though he was absent from the chamber at the time. As one hostile to the Independents, generally aligned in factional matters with the Presbyterians, he might have been expected to approve of the Accounts Committee, but in fact he deplored it. He assumed correctly that the legislation had been concocted by William Prynne and John Glover, neither being a Member of the Commons at the time, and it was doubtless this arrogation of authority that he found offensive. He recorded how he, Selden and John Glynne did their best to ‘lay open the insolency [and] shamelessness of these men to desire such a vast power to themselves as I believe most men abominated the thing’.399CJ iv. 123b; Harl. 166, f. 205; Harl. 483, ff. 191, 197v.

He continued to chalk up some successes. According to his account, it was he who moved (15 May) that William Batten should take charge of the fleet as a temporary locum tenens while the Houses bickered over the structure and command of the navy.400Harl. 166, f. 209v. Revisiting speeches earlier in the Parliament on the burden of taxation, he resisted the plan by the committee of the Eastern Association for another horse regiment to be funded by a further assessment on East Anglian counties. He dwelt on the collapse of the regional economy, asserting how lands of his that should have brought him rents of £100 a year were scarcely yielding half that. Partly as a result of his speech (19 May), which chimed with those of other knights and burgesses of the region, the focus shifted to the excise as a source of supply. With John Glynne, he successfully opposed a plan to tax London by way of a ‘loan’, in order to pay for the siege of Oxford. 401Harl. 166, ff. 210v, 213. D’Ewes was less successful in opposing the advance of martial law. As a champion of the common law, he had consistently tried to obstruct incursions on it of this kind, whether in December 1642 when it was mooted as part of a regional western association, March 1643 when Harley broached it in a committee report on prisoners, or when it was suggested as an alternative penal code for capital crimes. He could rely on support from Selden.402Harl. 164, ff. 274, 326, 326v, 367; Harl. 165, ff. 210v, 211. He voted on 30 May 1645 against the ordinance for national martial law, and opposed its introduction in East Anglia, arguing that the eastern counties were prominent in supporting the armies with men and money. He objected to the ordinance to allow impressment in the western counties, describing exemptions on payment of £10 as an intolerable burden on the poor and characterising the scheme as an oppression to match any identified in 1640-1. The measures went through the House nevertheless.403Harl. 166, ff. 213v, 216.

D’Ewes seems to have made a point of attending the many sessions of the committee of the whole House through 1645 on the introduction of a Presbyterian church structure into England. He continued to adhere to an Erastian stance that bordered on the aggressively anticlerical, rejecting the idea that ministers should decide who should be excluded from the Lord’s Supper. Nor was he enamoured of the Westminster Assembly. He found much to criticise in their papers on the nature of sin and its relation to participation in the ceremonial of the sacrament, and challenged the ministers on their grasp of church history and continental practice in reformed churches on jurisdictional matters.404Harl. 166, ff. 195v, 255v, 256v. He adhered to the principles of the legislation earlier in the Parliament which had excluded ministers from the commission of the peace. He argued that all who found themselves barred from communion should have the right to a hearing to vindicate themselves, and supported lay jurisdiction wherever possible, against Edmund Prideaux I, who feared that a comprehensive system of lay authority would leave the clergy with little to occupy their time.405Harl. 166, ff. 183, 202v, 204, 204v. He took a liberal line against adopting as a principle that those convicted under the common law should as an inevitable consequence of their conviction be excluded from sharing in the sacrament, and with support from Selden, argued for a comprehensive system of appeals on exclusions, and the House adopted this position (13 May).406Harl. 166, ff. 206, 209. In an inconclusive debate on 31 May, he argued against a clause that would have made speaking or preaching against the Directory of Worship punishable by life imprisonment for a third offence: ‘The truth will prevail of itself and need not be established with such rigorous punishment’; not for the first time, D’Ewes drew comparisons between what was now proposed and the overthrown episcopal regime, noting that at Uxbridge earlier that year even the king had tabled some provision for tender consciences.407Harl. 166, f. 214. On 21 June, the Commons voted in the committee of the whole House to hand over jurisdiction on this point to assizes and quarter sessions.408Harl. 166, f. 220v. D’Ewes was sufficiently animated by these debates to arrange the publication of a book he had begun around 1637, which argued that a light disciplinary structure had always been evident in the best reformed and primitive churches, and committed to print the essence of his contributions to the 1645 debates in the committee of the whole House.409S. D'Ewes, The Primitive Practise for Preserving Truth, (1645), sig. A3, pp. 8, 14-15 (E.290.9).

By early 1644, D’Ewes had begun to cultivate an association with the Portuguese ambassador, Antonio de Sousa, and in April that year was writing formally in Latin to the king of Portugal himself. He also wrote to the Portuguese grandee, Count Antonio de Almada.410Harl. 483, ff. 9v, 25v, 67v, 68, 69v, 70, 80v, 86v, 140v. An earlier interest of his in Portugal had doubtless been stimulated by his involvement in June 1642 with Sir Benjamin Rudyerd*, Denzil Holles and Laurence Whitaker in thanking the ambassador for his addresses to Parliament.411Watson, Library of Sir Simonds D'Ewes, 254; CJ ii. 617b. D’Ewes’s correspondence with King John IV was not sustained, but he became increasingly friendly with the ambassador, whom he sometimes met in the company of his other exotic associates, Count Egmont and the representatives of the United Provinces. As in the cases of so many of D’Ewes’s friends, the envoy’s intellectual interests chimed with those of D’Ewes himself: de Sousa was writing a history of Portugal.412Harl. 483, f. 9v. In April 1645, de Sousa, D’Ewes and their wives enjoyed a convivial dinner together.413Harl. 483, f. 196v. But the ambassador was a suspect figure in the eyes of the parliamentary leadership, because in February he had apparently sent along a priest to comfort the Irish rebel MacMahon, on his way to execution, and in July letters of his to the king were intercepted and read by the Committee for Examinations.414CJ iv. 19b, 46b, 191a,b, 195b, 197b, 236a. D’Ewes loyally took the envoy’s side, and just as he had defended the resident of the duke of Lorraine against charges of harbouring a priest, so he helped de Sousa at the Committees for Examinations and Sequestrations.415Harl. 483, ff. 146, 147v. Late 1644 and 1645 also saw the renewed attacks in Parliament on the count of Egmont for allegedly harbouring popish treasure. Like the other beneficiaries of D’Ewes’s interventions, the Portuguese resident represented a country that had challenged Habsburg hegemony: in the case of Portugal apparently very successfully since 1640, and the case illustrates further the distinction D’Ewes consistently drew in his utterances and his behaviour between Catholicism of a sincere kind and hispanicized,’popish’ statecraft, whether at home or abroad.

As defeat threatened the king’s army in the summer of 1645, D’Ewes was inclined to see the destruction of the king’s forces in providentialist terms, as a punishment for the unbridled immorality among the royalist soldiers.416Harl. 166, f. 214v. In the aftermath of Naseby, and in line with his usual stance, D’Ewes argued for leniency and compromise. He sought to abate the burden of fines proposed by the Committee for Compounding, lest they should destroy estates.417Harl. 166, f. 251v. He wanted to encourage royalists in the west to come over to Parliament, voted against legislation to sell off delinquents’ estates, and urged restraint in the number of triumphalist days of thanksgiving, since it was harvest time: ‘The gaining of one harvest might be worth Sherborne Castle’.418Harl. 166, ff. 253v, 254v, 255v. He may have conceded that an exception could be made of the proposed grant to the prince elector, as he was named second to the committee seeing through the ordinance, but his diary comments suggest ambivalence at best.419CJ iv. 281a, Harl. 166, f. 265v; Harl. 484, f. 32v. He was evidently uncomfortable that the reading of the king’s correspondence captured at Naseby provoked many in the House to ‘laugh as at a May game’.420Harl. 166, f. 221. He remained sympathetic to the Stuarts. He wanted the 4th earl of Northumberland (Algernon Percy†) to be given a generous allowance to reflect the heavy responsibility of looking after the king’s young family, and on 9 September visited the nine-year old Princess Elizabeth at Whitehall, taking her some ancient English coins as a gift.421Harl. 166, f. 221; Harl. 484, f. 29v. He served on the committee for an ordinance to provide pensions for servants of the royal children.422CJ iv. 335b.

He was more likely to cavil at what he repeatedly called ‘arbitrary power’ displayed by the victorious side. When Speaker Lenthall picked up on a fast day preacher’s reference to injustice as a message to the central law courts (27 Aug.), D’Ewes insisted that what had been meant was fee-taking by Parliament’s executive committees, but he found no support in the House. He was fearful of the powers invested in the City militia committee, and disliked rewards to soldiers (even Presbyterian ones), opposing the plan by Prideaux I and the Committee of the West to bestow ironworks in the Forest of Dean on Edward Massie*.423Harl. 166, ff. 257, 261v, 266v, 268v. When on 30 October the committee of the whole House met to discuss peace propositions to the king, D’Ewes stayed away rather than endure the ‘hammering’ of the exceptions to indemnity proposed for prominent royalists.424Harl. 166, f. 272v. Arbitrary power was just as likely to proceed from the clergy, and D’Ewes was always alert to any resurgence of clerical pretensions. He opposed printing a sermon by the Scots preacher George Gillespie (5 Sept.) because he had contradicted things in a sermon of Thomas Coleman’s published by parliamentary authority, and was sympathetic to the Independent Sir Peter Wentworth*, who detected unwarranted meddling by the Westminster Assembly in a petition intended for the Commons from the City, which called for accelerated progress towards establishing presbyteries. On 3 October he spoke several times in the committee of the whole House against the power of presbyteries to exclude from the Lord’s Supper, denouncing it as ‘an infinite oppression upon the consciences and quiet of the subjects of England, [being] of pride, tyranny and insolency of the clergy’.425Harl. 166, ff. 261, 265, 265v, 267v. Against Sir Gilbert Gerard’s view that presbyters would judge individual cases of scandal rather than the ontological content of the offence itself, D’Ewes doubted whether example and principle could meaningfully be separated.426Harl. 166, f. 267v. He had approved of William Gurnall’s disdain for episcopal institution when he was promoting him to the living of Lavenham, and in October 1645 supported the limitation of one year proposed for the ordinance on ordinations.427Harl. 483, f. 105; Harl. 166, f. 271.

D’Ewes after the parliamentary diaries, 1645-50

Despite his decision in November 1645 to abandon his parliamentary diary-keeping, D’Ewes continued to be an active Member through 1646, being called to nearly twice as many committees in the latter year as the preceding one. On half these committees (9 out of 17) he was named with Selden. His hostility to martial law can be assumed to have informed his conduct at the committee on it (1 Jan.), and similarly his lack of sympathy with the subject of discussion can be inferred from his appointment to examine the pamphlet, A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens by the Leveller, Richard Overton (11 July).428CJ iv. 394b, 616a. He was named to two committees (8 May, 9 June) on the crisis in Parliament’s relations with the Scots, precipitated by the escape of the king to the Scots camp at Newcastle.429CJ iv. 540a, 570b. His appointments on religious or ecclesiastical topics included one investigating the content of oaths taken at the universities and on clandestine marriages (30 Sept.), on the printing of the Greek Bible that was in the possession of the royal librarian (and D’Ewes’s friend) Patrick Young (16 Oct.), and on whether bishops who had eventually sided with Parliament should be given pensions (2 Nov.).430CJ iv. 678b, 695a, 712a. The background to this last-named discussion was the abolition of the episcopal church structure. On the fate of individual bishops, in 1644 D’Ewes had proved more sympathetic to Laud than might have been expected, and considered that his trial degenerated into a mere show of legal process.431Harl. 483, ff. 137, 138, 141v, 142v. He corresponded amicably with Ralph Brownrigg, bishop of Exeter and vice-chancellor of Cambridge, had approved of the release from custody in September 1645 of Thomas Morton, the ‘good’ bishop of Durham, detained by Parliament for refusing to hand over the seal of the county palatine containing his see, and in March 1647 received his great friend, James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh, who was interested in his library and coin collection.432Harl. 483, f. 6v, Harl. 484, ff. 29, 46v.

On 16 December 1646, D’Ewes was among 73 Commons-men called to the privileges committee, to which disputed elections were referred. Over a year earlier, probably in October 1645, he had been approached obliquely by Edward Leigh*, who sought help with his candidature at Stafford, but D’Ewes had disapproved of the ‘recruiter’ elections, fearing that they could only bring in their wake renewed conflict and ruin.433CJ v. 14b; Harl. 6711, f. 12; Harl. 484, f. 26. Through 1646 he had recorded the bare bones of election disputes, such as the one at Stafford, in terms of faction-fighting between Independents and Presbyterians, but as a neutral and passive observer rather than as a partisan.434Harl. 484, ff. 69v, 72, 75v, 77, 144. One by-election which did draw his fire was the contest at Cirencester, which he saw as naked intimidation by New Model soldiers in order to secure the return of Sir Thomas Fairfax*. He attended a number of meetings of the committee of privileges on this election, which he considered bogus.435Harl. 484, ff. 145v, 149v, 150, 150v, 152. He also attended at least one meeting about the return of Thomas Gell* to Derby.436Harl. 484, f. 157. With a total of 15 committee appointments in 1647, it could hardly be said that D’Ewes was inactive, but he was increasingly minded to walk out of the chamber when he disapproved of proceedings, rather than stay and fight. For some years he had been given to doing this on occasion, for example on 7 July 1645, when he foresaw a long and fevered debate on the roles of Denzil Holles and Bulstrode Whitelocke* in the episode known to historians as the Savile affair, and when he simply failed to attend a committee on the London militia to which he had been named (6 Sept. 1645); but he left early on two days in succession in February 1647 when the Independents were successfully resisting the drastic troop reductions that D’Ewes favoured.437Harl. 484, ff. 13, 13v, 27v, 152v; CJ iv. 264b. On 11 March, however, he remained in his place to speak out against Fairfax’s army, and the same day he attended the committee appointed in January to consider the proposals of Abraham Burrell.438Harl. 484, f. 156; CJ v. 47a.

The ordinance on moral offences upon which D’Ewes and others had been called to work in January 1645 had long since withered, but on 28 May 1647, a renewed effort was made to progress it. A fresh committee, to which D’Ewes was called third, was authorised to bring in two ordinances, one on sexual offences, the other on drunkenness and verbal outrages such as cursing and blasphemy. Except for the committee on abolishing deans and chapters (16 June 1648), this was to be his last committee on religious subject matter.439CJ v. 189a, 602a. The interest inherent for him in this may have been enough to keep him at Westminster, however, together with his easy access to records and the company of like-minded antiquaries. In March 1647 he spent two days with the royalist William Dugdale, and was working on a book with a Greek title, ‘Autonomy’, possibly intended to be a contribution to debate on church government.440Harl. 484, f. 157v. In 1645 he had been named as a lay elder when Suffolk had been divided into Presbyterian classes, but he could hardly have been active in it, as he remained in London. His decision to stay meant that he was among those left in the House after the Independents fled to the protection of the army in July. He was named to a committee on 21 July on abuses in army pay, and during the period of Speaker Lenthall’s absence, to the committee (2 Aug.) investigating the tumults of 26 July. After the return of the Independents, under the watchful gaze of the New Model, he was included in the committee of 11 August on the bill to repeal all the proceedings of the House during their absence. When a week later the ordinance from the Lords was brought into the Commons on a 24 vote majority in a House of 148, D’Ewes was confirmed on the committee to revise it.441CJ v. 253a, 265a, 272a, 278a. After that, the committee nominations fell away to one a month. Notable among these was the committee of 13 November on the king’s safety, convened two days after he had escaped from Hampton Court. It was charged with preparing a declaration on the king’s security, to be added to an earlier one. If the latter was that of 31 July, it had been made void as a product of the period when the Houses were under duress. No declaration seems to have been forthcoming.442CJ v. 262a, 358b. In October, Sir John Potts* tried to enlist D’Ewes’s help in thwarting attempts to block the election of Sir John Palgrave*, further evidence that the antiquary was still regarded as an active parliamentarian worth lobbying.443Harl. 383, f. 216.

With the king effectively in captivity on the Isle of Wight from mid-November 1647, the case could reasonably made that proper care should be taken for his property in London. D’Ewes would surely have voted against the Commons’ resolution on 17 January 1648 not to continue addresses to the king. The day after this vote, he was party to a symbolic assertion of loyalty to the king by the antiquarian community. D’Ewes had long been a friend of Patrick Young, the king’s librarian, and it was doubtless with Young’s involvement that D’Ewes, Selden and William Wheler* secured an order of both Houses to remove the king’s library from Whitehall to St James’s Palace.444CJ v. 436b; LJ ix. 666b. This must have been with the approval, tacit or otherwise, of William Dugdale, an antiquary closer to the king than D’Ewes had been, because relations between D’Ewes and Dugdale seem to have been cordial throughout the late 1640s. Between March and June, the parliamentary record is silent on D’Ewes’s role at Westminster, but in June he was named to two committees and secured the reading of a petition he had delivered from widows and children of parliamentarian soldiers.445CJ v. 580b, 602a, 614a. The following month, he spoke against the Vote of No Addresses. It may well have been the last parliamentary speech of his to be recorded, although its brevity and pithiness sounds unlike D’Ewes. Against the views of Sir Henry Vane II and Sir Henry Mildmay* that the king had perjured himself and could not be trusted, he allegedly insisted that Parliament was in no position to insist on terms because of its many weaknesses: ‘Your silver is clip’t, your gold ship’t, your ships are revolted, your selves condemned, your Scottish friends engaged against you and the affections of the City and the kingdom quite alienated from you’. He urged a speedy reconciliation with the king.446Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 16 (11-18 July 1648), sig. Q4 (E.453.11). If it was delivered at all, the speech was made in the week following the defeat and arrest of D’Ewes’s friend, the earl of Holland, after an abortive rising. On 11 July, D’Ewes was named to the committee to which papers on Holland’s case were referred, but he was evidently unable to save his associate from eventual trial and execution.447CJ v. 631b; Oxford DNB, 'Henry Rich, 1st earl of Holland'.

On 5 September, D’Ewes was with four Presbyterians tasked with preparing a declaration prior to a call of the House planned for three weeks’ time.448CJ vi. 7a.This should be taken as evidence of his continuing political commitment to a concessionary settlement with the king, as a call of the House in these circumstances was an attempt to gather support for the treaty under discussion at Newport. He was present for the call on the 26th, and was doubtless dismayed by the 162 Members absent.449CJ vi. 34a, b; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 110. On 19 October, however, he was made keeper of the royal coin and medal collection by the king, along with Patrick Young. Once again, there was a political dimension to his antiquarian pursuits. D’Ewes was given particular liberty to sort out the collection and dispose of duplicates.450Harl. 6988, f. 216. It is tempting to speculate that his gift to Princess Elizabeth had been more calculated than his bald diary account suggests. It is not impossible that he travelled to the Isle of Wight to petition for this appointment, but it is far more likely that D’Ewes owed the grant to the intervention of James Stuart, 4th duke of Lennox and 1st duke of Richmond, a royalist peer acting as a commissioner for the king at the treaty negotiations, who wrote to him on 8 October.451Harl. 287, f. 283. The antiquary’s disobliging attitude towards the duke in 1642 had evidently been set aside. D’Ewes was probably in the House on 24 October to be nominated to the last committee of his parliamentary career: appropriately enough on a subject which would have met with his approval, an ordinance to compensate John Bastwick, a victim of Laud.452CJ vi. 60a. It was inevitable that such a vocal opponent of the army and of the Independents would be among the targets for Thomas Pride* and his soldiers at the purge on 6 December. He was released from detention on the 14th, but his political career had ended.453Parliament under the Power of the Sword (1648, 669.f.13.52); Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 159. He was luckier than his correspondent, Edward Leigh, who was still in detention on 17 January.454Harl. 383, f. 215.

On his release, D’Ewes devoted himself to his antiquarian interests entirely. William Dugdale wrote to him on 20 January 1649, predicting the imminent execution of the king, which would be ‘the shame of the English nation to this and future ages’, and doubtless D’Ewes concurred. They consoled each other in ‘the advancement of learning, which will … ere long shine out brightly in this kingdom again notwithstanding the darkness of these clouds that now shadow it’.455Harl. 374, f. 281. In April, John Stuteville, whom D’Ewes had helped on numerous occasions at parliamentary committees, wrote him a jeremiad on the state of the nation, which included a lament for ‘our free Parliaments (which have formerly been the very heart and vitals of the kingdom) … driven away, and confined to a very few, within the walls of the House of Commons, and those over-awed by the sword’.456Harl. 374, f. 282. Later that year, D’Ewes was thanked profusely by Cambridge University for his recent donations of coins and books. He was evidently working on a book, which Anthony Tuckney, master of Emmanuel College, thought would glorify `the whole English nation’.457Harl. 374, ff. 283, 285. Like many other projects of D’Ewes, the work seems never to have been completed. D’Ewes died of a fever at his London lodgings at Westminster on 18 April 1650, and his body was taken to Suffolk on 29 May, where he was buried at Stowlangtoft on 7 June.458CB ii. 103; Watson, Library of Sir Simonds D'Ewes, 81; Stowlangtoft par. reg.; Essex RO (Chelmsford), D/DQs. 18, f. 115. He had first drafted his will in 1639, and revised it in 1645. It specified that his library and coin collection should not be broken up, and bequeathed to his ‘best of friends’ Archbishop Ussher, a Greek manuscript. One of his executors was Arthur, brother of Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston*.459Autobiography, ii. 148-58; PROB11/212, f. 292v.

Conclusions

‘Many rather amusing things about him are going around amongst his countrymen’, snidely wrote a scholar about D’Ewes in 1640, and his persona has tended to provoke amusement and revulsion in commentators ever since.460Correspondence of John Morris with Johannes de Laet, 1634-49 ed. Johannes Antonius Frederik Bekkers (Nijmegen, ?1970), 49. There is no doubt that he could be pompous and presumptuous in his dealings with others, especially his intellectual seniors, and he was as prone as any in the scholarly community to petty rivalries and jealousies. Much of the evidence for D’Ewes’s bumptiousness is provided by his own unpublished, private writings, however, which are on a scale unmatched by any of his parliamentary contemporaries. The surviving volumes of his letters and diaries inevitably create an impression of egotism simply because of D’Ewes’s habit of recording his own doings, and his determination that the record created for posterity should survive. The duration of the typical parliamentary day, and its interactive complexity, provided a sufficient matrix for all of D’Ewes’s contributions to debate to have been delivered much as he recorded them, and there seems no reason to conclude, in the context of his entire parliamentary activity, that they were contaminated by wishful thinking or an element of fantasy.461J.S. Morrill, 'Paying One's Dues', PH xiv. 183-5, 'Getting Over D'Ewes', PH xv. 229. To be set against D’Ewes’s pomposity and egotism are his extraordinary loyalty to his friends, which involved him in countless appearances at parliamentary committees as an agent; and his bravery in holding to unpopular lines of argument, especially since he was sensitive to what other Commons-men thought of him.

D’Ewes’s primary interests lay in scholarship and learning, but neither in his own mind nor in practice did they reside in a separate sphere from the world of public affairs. In a deliberate way, he made available his knowledge of ancient statutes and precedents for the benefit of Parliament, and was shocked when scholarship was disrespected or ignored. He often adhered to intellectual positions, such as on the relative merits of acts as opposed to ordinances, or on the supremacy of precedent, long after more flexible politicians had conceded the ground and moved on. He shared his intellectual pursuits widely with others, but in the civil war these pursuits tended to underpin his relations with commoners and peers on the king’s side, or with those ready and willing to make concessions in pursuit of peace. They also led him to cultivate a range of exotic visitors to England, but never towards association with the elements in Parliament most hostile to the king, and a distinguishing common feature of those he dismissed as ‘violent’ or ‘fiery’ was what appeared to him as a lack of interest in antiquities. Scholarship was the means by which he inched towards the king’s circle in 1648, having by that time lost sympathy entirely with the drift of parliamentary politics, and it provides part of the key to his perspective on Catholicism, which he appraised in ways that were much more sophisticated than the simplicities apparently espoused by most of his parliamentary colleagues. The other ingredient in his perspective on international affairs was his own appreciation of himself as an outsider in terms of family history, which led him towards sympathy with foreign nobles who to D’Ewes represented defiance of the Habsburgs and Spanish interests across Europe.

D’Ewes’s associations with colleagues in the Commons and Lords were distinctive in being more strongly sustained in the latter House than the former. He was a good friend of John Moore, on the basis of their shared interest in diaries, and he overcame jealousy of John Selden to become a reliable associate of his on committees. In both these cases was there a shared interest other than politics. Otherwise, his diaries suggest that in the House he kept aloof from faction and cultivated no cronies. He enjoyed more enduring friendships with peers, it seems, although D’Ewes’s undoubted snobbery may have impelled him towards keeping a fuller record of these interactions. The earls of Holland, Pembroke and Manchester figure regularly in the periods of the Latin diaries, although his comments on them, beyond the social niceties, are relatively sparse. He undoubtedly loved the confidences they occasionally imparted, but to call D’Ewes a ‘client’ of any of these peers would be to stretch the evidence and the term. He certainly wanted to be a client of Pembroke but got little or nothing from him; there is no evidence that Holland gave him anything other than insights into what the peace party was doing in the Lords, important though that may have been on occasion; and the one peer who probably did secure office for D’Ewes, Lennox and Richmond, was a man he himself had denounced in 1642.

Much of D’Ewes’s endurance at Westminster, despite his lack of sympathy with proceedings there, can be attributed to his belief in the power of Parliament to usher in an uncompromisingly Erastian church government. Re-building the state church to the detriment of clerical authority was a consistent and abiding interest of his, which persisted despite the contradictions evident elsewhere in his public utterances. He was deeply hostile to Strafford, and was sympathetic to the London crowd and its role in forwarding the Grand Remonstrance, but resisted any tarnishing of the king’s honour, and some of his remarks as the country descended into civil war seem those of a man whose powers of analysis were failing him. Though he resisted seeing himself as aligned in factional terms, he should best be thought of as a peace party dependable, but on military matters an Essexian, and after the Self-Denying Ordinance a Presbyterian. Quite how acute an observer of politics he was is hard to tell. The incomparable riches of his diaries are offset by his dismissiveness towards colleagues, and occasionally the self-consciousness of the diarizing led him to deliberately cynical assessments of motives and behaviour.