An Industrious Mind

Sir Simonds D’Ewes is known to historians primarily through two texts: his Autobiography, edited by J.O. Halliwell in 1845, and his ‘journal’, which constitutes our fullest account of the momentous first years of the Long Parliament. As this impressive biography demonstrates, however, his archive is far more extensive and worthy of much greater scrutiny than it has hitherto received. The Autobiography and parliamentary journal comprise only five of the seventy-odd volumes which constitute the D’Ewes archive among the Harleian collection in the British Library. J. Sears McGee has done an important scholarly service in his extensive work with these materials, and has produced a detailed and fascinating account of D’Ewes’s life, work and interests. As McGee notes in his introduction, Sir Simonds has not fared well at the hands of modern scholarship; this, remarkably, is his first biography. A pattern was established by the Victorian scholar John Bruce, who described D’Ewes as ‘self-satisfied’, ‘pompous’, a pedantic snob and ‘altogether ludicrous’. His puritan fastidiousness and meticulous reverence for precedent certainly sit uneasily with modern sensibilities. A further blow to D’Ewes’s image came with John Morrill’s 1995 article, which argued that D’Ewes’s account of the Long Parliament was deeply suspect because he exaggerated his own importance. By contrast, McGee offers a sympathetic account of a man who is clearly much more worthy of study than many have believed, and certainly a figure far removed from Bruce’s caricature

Art · Biography · Epistemology · Literature · Parliament · Political science · Reverence · Scholarship · Scrutiny · Sociology · Theology · Classics · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Philosophy