An Industrious Mind: The Worlds of Sir Simonds D'Ewes 9780804794282

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An Industrious Mind

An Industrious Mind The Worlds of Sir Simonds D’Ewes

J. Sears McGee

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2015 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McGee, J. Sears (James Sears), author An industrious mind : the worlds of Sir Simonds D’Ewes / J. Sears McGee.        p. cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   isbn 978-0-8047-8546-4 (cloth : alk. paper)  1. D’Ewes, Simonds, Sir, 1602–1650.  2. Great Britain. Parliament—Biography.  3. Antiquarians—England—Biography.  4. Puritans—England—Biography.  5. Great Britain—Politics and government—1642–1649.  6. Great Britain—History—Early Stuarts, 1603–1649.  I. Title.   da390.1.d5m33 2015   941.06'2092—dc23 [B]

2014034992

isbn 978-0-8047-9428-2 (electronic) Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10.5/13 Palatino

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

For marni mcgee and the memory of

mary beth mcgee

(1918–2012)

Contents

List of Figures   x Preface   xi Abbreviations   xv Author’s Note   xix

Introduction: “An industrious mind”   1

1 “A rationall hearer”—1602–1620   17 Early Schooling in Dorset, 19 London and Suffolk, 24 St. John’s College, Cambridge, 29 The Summons to the Middle Temple, 39

2 “The whole time & minde are filled with law” —1620–1626   44 The Law Student, 46 A Slow Start, 46  The Call to the Bar, 50

The Historian, 53 The Discovery of “Records,” 55  The D’Ewes Saga, 59  The Earldom of Oxford, 67

The Newshound in London, 69 D’Ewes’s Sources for News, 71  The Credibility and Dissemination of News, 75  The Spanish Marriage, 76  A New King, 79  A Plethora of Parliaments, 82

The Sermon Gadder, 87 The Stowlangtoft Pulpit, 91  The (Almost) Complete Puritan, 93  Soteriological Debates, 97  The Widow Ogle, 99

The Suitor, 102 The Failed Attempts, 103  The “Golden Valentine,” 105  Lady Elizabeth Denton, 108  Lady Anne Clopton, 110

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3 “To dippe my pen in teares not inke”—1626–1631   116 The Complete Puritan, 118 Assurance of Salvation, 119  The Habsburg Threat, 123  The Early Britons and Pelagianism, 125

The Novellor, 130 The 1626 Parliament and the Forced Loan, 132  The La Rochelle Debacle, 134  1628: Great Britain’s Strength and Weakness, 136  The Assassination of Buckingham, 143 The 1629 Dissolution, 149  The Habsburg Onslaught, 154  The Habsburg Retreat, 157

The Antiquarian and Collector, 162 Buying Manuscripts and Books, 163  The History of Britain, 164

The Young Husband, 171 Islington, 175  The Death of Paul D’Ewes, 179

4 “My dearest dearest”—1631–1639   186 The Search for a Home, 187 Deaths and Dangers, 188  Bringing Up Richard, 192  Peripatetic Again, 196  Bereft Parents, 198

The Travels of Richard, 205 Richard’s Grand Tour, 208  Italy, Geneva, and the Homeward Turn, 214 

The Scholarly Collector, 218 Sir Robert Cotton’s Demise, 220  Preserving the Library, 222  Projects Old and New, 225  The Last Sabbatical, 234

5 “The highest stepp of wickednes”—1631–1639   237 The Newshound in Suffolk, 237 The Protestant Cause, 239  The Queen of Bohemia and the Prince Elector, 246  Ship Money and the Prayer Book Rebellion, 254

The Iconophobic Puritan, 257 A Trumpet Blast against “Altar-adorers,” 260  The Treatise on Idolatry, 265  The Treatise on Persecution, 268  The Lure of New England, 275

6 “An Iliad of miseries”—1639–1640   282 The Sheriff of Suffolk, 283 The Illegality of Ship Money, 285  The (Non)-collection of Ship Money, 289

The Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 294 The New Parliament, 301 The MP Approaches His Task, 305  A Walter Mitty?, 309  An Industrious MP, 312

The MP—the First Six Weeks, 314

Contents Contents  ix

7 “Stub vp the rootes of all our mischifes” (December, 1640– July, 1642)   324 The MP—December, 1640–July, 1641), 324 Parliamentary Privileges, 324 Taxation, 332  The Earl of Strafford, 335  The Assault on Episcopacy, 337

The Bereft Husband, 341 The MP—August 1641 to July 1642, 348 Reform of Religion, 348  The “Incident” in Scotland and Rebellion in Ireland, 350  The Attempt on the Five Members, 355  The “Paper War,” 359  The “Fiery Spirits,” 365  The Day of Humiliation, 368

8 No end . . . but by the sword”   373 The Willughby Marriage, 374 The MP Returns to the Fray, 382 The Continuing Quest for Peace, 385  The Death of Richard D’Ewes, 390  More Fiery Spirits, 393  Peace or War?, 395  Horses, Taxes, and Oaths, 400  A Presbyterian Church of England?, 407  Preachers and Pulpits, 412

The Last Years   417 The Numismatist, 418  Documents, Descents, and Dictionaries, 419  Pride’s Purge, 425  Private Life—and Death, 427



Epilogue, 432

Appendixes    A. The D’Ewes Genealogy, 437 B. The Children of Sir Edmonds D’Ewes, 438

Notes   439 Index   493

ix

Figures

1.1 Detail from D’Ewes Monument   40 2.1 St. George Stowlangtoft   92 2.2 Kedington Pulpit   95 2.3 Barnardiston Pew at Kedington   96 2.4 Portrait of Anne Clopton (1626)   111 3.1 MS of “Great Brittaines Strengh and Weakenes”   139 4.1 D’Ewes and Clopton Arms at Long Melford   172 5.1 The “Baby Brass” at Lavenham   203

Preface

This book offers at least a partial answer to a question I puzzled over while researching my doctoral dissertation in the late 1960s. It was based largely on the writings of clergymen published between 1620 and 1670. As I analyzed sermons and devotional treatises looking for the political implications of religious concepts, I wondered what the laity made of the enormous body of material their preachers provided. The surviving evidence for clerical opinion bulks large, while that for the laity is slender. I planned to write another book consisting of case studies of members of the Long Parliament for whom sources exist that would enable me to study the relationship between their religious views and their political behavior. I selected Simonds D’Ewes as one of my cases, having found his treatise on persecution (The Primitive Practice for Preserving Truth, 1645) in the Thomason Tracts. After completing other projects, I was on sabbatical in autumn 1999 and ready—at long last—to return to this one. I was astonished to discover that only five of the more than seventy volumes of D’Ewes’s papers had received significant scholarly attention. Although I badly underestimated the magnitude of the task I faced, I could not abandon it because I realized that, in D’Ewes’s papers, I had an opportunity to delve deeply into the mind of a devout lay Puritan who was an active MP in the Long Parliament and to write a biography that would explore the public and private concerns of an early Stuart individual at an unprecedented level of detail. No one who has written a book of this kind can avoid incurring many debts, and the incurring of them is one of the greatest pleasures the life of a historian affords. I would not have been a historian at all had I not experienced the mentoring of Peter Laslett and John Elliott, my supervisors at Trinity College, Cambridge, during my junior year abroad in 1962–63. During my senior year at Rice University, Len Marsak and Lou Galambos

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reinforced my resolve to go to graduate school. At Yale, Jack Hexter and Edmund Morgan directed my research and earned my eternal gratitude for their wit, intellect, and guidance. All these men taught me to take history very seriously and myself not too seriously. They showed how doing history can be fun. I joyously dedicate this book to the memory of my mother, Mary Beth McGee, and to my wife, Marni. My mother, an omnivorous and curious reader with an industrious and perceptive mind, encouraged my reading habits from childhood. Even after her eyesight failed, she listened as I read from the manuscript and asked thoughtful questions. I regret my inability to finish it before her death in 2012 because we would have enjoyed talking about it. Marni is a brilliant writer and editor who was the first reader of each chapter and a keen partner on what we came to call “the D’Ewes trail.” We visited the places in Suffolk where he and his kinfolk and friends had lived: Stowlangtoft, Lavenham, Ixworth, Bury St Edmunds, Long Melford, Kedington, Thornham, Boxted, Dalham, Preston, and elsewhere. Readers interested in viewing color photos from our jaunts and other sources will find them at http://www.history.ucsb.edu/ faculty/sears/dewes.pdf. When I returned from long, entrancing days of reading in the D’Ewes papers in the British Library, she listened with interest to the stories I had to tell. In the spring of 2001, I attended one of John Morrill’s seminars in Cambridge and told him of my then early interest in D’Ewes. He very kindly introduced me to his former student Peter Salt. Peter soon became essential to my research because he generously gave me access to the translations he had commissioned from Nigel Rubbra of D’Ewes’s Latin correspondence with Albert Joachimi, Johannes de Laet, and others. Peter’s generosity did not end with this splendid gift. He read and commented extensively on the draft chapters as they emerged and discussed them with me many times. His contribution to whatever virtues it possesses is beyond my ability to enumerate or adequately express. Blair Worden, like Marni, encouraged my work on D’Ewes from the beginning and later read and commented on the entire manuscript. Similarly, Paul Seaver, Barbara Donagan, Chris Kyle, Daniel Woolf, George Woodward, and Ian Gentles read the entire manuscript and gave me excellent suggestions. Ian also gave me access to his copy of Anne Steele Young’s typescript of D’Ewes’s Long Parliament journal. Several long lunches in London with Stephen Roberts were invaluable for my interpretation of D’Ewes’s thinking in the 1640s, and I am most grateful to him for making available to me Don Gilbert’s translations of D’Ewes’s Latin diaries for the History of Parliament Trust. I have benefited greatly from the advice of friends who read parts of the manuscript: Tom Cogswell, David Cressy, Jordan Downs, Paul Halliday, Simon Healy, Peter Lake, Ed McFall,

Preface

Jason Peacey, and David Trim. I have enjoyed helpful conversations and/ or correspondence about particular questions with Ann Jensen Adams, Hilary Bernstein, Lynn Botelho, Louis Caron, David Coast, David Como, Pauline Croft, Richard Cust, Eamon Darcy, Beth Digeser, Hal Drake, Jason Eldred, Ken Fincham, Andrew Foster, Matt Growhoski, Felicity Heal, Caroline Hibbard, Lamar Hill, Derek Hirst, Ann Hughes, Arnold Hunt, Robert Ingram, Michael Kelly, Paulina Kewes, Mark Kishlansky, Fritz Levy, Anthony Milton, Robert Morstein-Marx, Carol Pal, Wilf Prest, John Reeve, Mary Robertson, David Harris Sacks, Lois Schwoerer, Malcolm Smuts, Paul Sonnino, Isaac Stephens, Diane Stowell, John Sutton, Stefania Tutino, Alison Wall, Richard Weller-Poley, and Diane Willen. My editors at Stanford University Press—Norris Pope, Stacy Wagner, and Eric Brandt—have been a pleasure to work with. Despite this cloud of witnesses, any flaws that remain are my responsibility alone. I am grateful to the Committee on Research at the University of California for grants that supported some of my travel as well as funds for the translation of Latin material by UCSB graduate students Lauren Horn Griffin, Patrick Ludolph, Joe Figliulo-Rosswurm, Corinne Wieben, and John Scholl. Students in my graduate seminars also made stimulating suggestions, especially Tim Daniels, Lauren Horn Griffin, Wendy Hurford, Patrick Ludolph, Jessica Murphy, Nathan Perry, and Brian Thomasson. The staff of the Manuscripts Reading Room at the British Library—my “home away from home” in London—has always facilitated my work with courtesy and professionalism. And in Suffolk, the help Marni and I received from Ann and Ted Boyton, the key-holders to the late-fourteenth-century church of St. George Stowlangtoft, was wonderful. They live directly across “The Street” from the church in the tiny village and next to the alms cottages built with funds designated for the poor in the will of Simonds D’Ewes’s brother, Richard. They were pleased to help my research and during our first visit even lent us a stepladder so we could get a better photograph of the D’Ewes wall monument in the chancel. When we asked for advice about where to find a good lunch, they rightly sent us to the Pykkerell Inn on the High Street in Ixworth just two miles away. When they noticed that, in our excitement, we had forgotten to return the key to the church, Ted drove over to collect it from us at the pub. Like many scholars, I get questions from time to time about what the questioner takes to be the onerous requirement “to publish.” The help I have had from people in England like the Boytons and others we met on the “D’Ewes trail” and from the many friends mentioned above demonstrates how what might seem a lonely quest is also a communal one. When that is added to the intellectual enjoyment I have had in teasing out the contents of Simonds D’Ewes’s “industrious mind” and the light those

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Preface

contents throw on the great issues that roiled Stuart England, it should be obvious that the obligation “to publish” has been for me a source of unending delight and satisfaction. My teaching has always drawn deeply from the well of my research, and I know it has made me a better teacher of undergraduates and graduate students. I hope I have done justice to my longtime “companion,” Simonds D’Ewes. Santa Barbara, California—May 2014

Abbreviations

Autobiography

Harley MS 646 is a fair copy in D’Ewes’s hand. Citations are from this manuscript, the folios of which D’Ewes himself numbered. The location of the quotation in the printed edition of 1845 by J. O. Halliwell (see below) is then given in parentheses.

BL

British Library.

Bourcier

Elizabeth Bourcier, ed. The Diary of Sir Simonds D’Ewes 1622–1624. Paris: Didier, 1974. A transcription of Harley MS 481, one of four diaries he kept in cipher.

Bruce, Review

John Bruce. “The Long Parliament and Sir Simonds D’Ewes.” Edinburgh Review. Vol. 84 (1846): 76–102.

Bruce, Journal

John Bruce, “Some Notes on Facts in the Biography of Sir Simonds D’Ewes.” Archaeological Journal. Vol. 26 (1869): 323–338.

CCEd

Clergy of the Church of England Database (www. theclergydatabase.org.uk )

Coates

Willson Havelock Coates, ed. The Journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes from the First Recess of the Long Parliament to the Withdrawal of King Charles from London. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942.

Cust

Richard Cust, Charles I: a Political Life. London: Pearson Longman, 2005.

Gardiner, History Samuel Rawson Gardiner. History of England . . . 1603– 1642. 10 vols. London, 1896. Gardiner, War

Samuel Rawson Gardiner. History of the Great Civil War, 1642–1649. 4 vols.

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Abbreviations

Halliwell

James Orchard Halliwell, ed. The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, Bart. London, 1845. 2 vols.

Hirst

Derek Hirst. The Representative of the People? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

HJ

Historical Journal.

JBS

Journal of British Studies.

Kyle

Chris R. Kyle. Theater of State: Parliament and Political Culture in Early Stuart England. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Marsden

J. H. Marsden. College Life in the Time of James the First, as Illustrated by an Unpublished Diary of Sir Symonds D’Ewes, Baronet, and M.P., for some time a Fellow-Commoner of St. John’s College, Cambridge. London, 1851.

Notestein

Wallace Notestein, ed. The Journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes from the Beginning of the Long Parliament to the Opening of the Trial of the Earl of Strafford. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923.

OED

Oxford English Dictionary. 2d ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

ODNB

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

PJLP-1

Willson H. Coates, Anne Steele Young, Vernon F. Snow, eds. The Private Journals of the Long Parliament 3 January to 5 March 1642. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.

PJLP-2

Vernon F. Snow and Anne Steele Young, eds. The Private Journals of the Long Parliament 7 March to 1 June 1642. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

PJLP-3

Vernon F. Snow and Anne Steele Young, eds. The Private Journals of the Long Parliament 2 June to 17 September 1642. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

POSLP

Maija Jansson, ed. Proceedings in the Opening Session of the Long Parliament. Rochester, New York, and Suffolk, UK: University of Rochester Press, 2000–2007. 7 vols.

Prest

Wilfrid R. Prest, The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts, 1590–1640. London: Longman, 1972.

Primitive Practise Simonds D’Ewes. The Primitive Practise for Preserving Truth. 2d impression. London: 1645.

Abbreviations

Russell, PEP

Conrad Russell. Parliaments and English Politics, 1621– 1629. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.

Russell, FBM

Conrad Russell. The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637– 1642. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

Salt

Peter Salt. “Sir Simonds D’Ewes and the Levying of Ship Money 1635–1640. The Historical Journal. Vol. 37 (1994): 253–287.

Sharpe

Kevin Sharpe. The Personal Rule of Charles I. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992.

TNA

The National Archives, London

Tyacke

Nicholas Tyacke. Anti-Calvinists: the Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.

Venn

J. Venn., and Venn, J. A., compilers. Alumni Cantabrigiensis Part 1 (to 1751). 4 vols. Cambridge: At the University Press, 1922–27.

Watson

Andrew G. Watson. The Library of Sir Simonds D’Ewes. London: the Trustees of the British Museum, 1966.

Wilson

Peter H. Wilson. The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009.

WR

A. G. Matthews, Walker Revised. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.

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Author’s Note

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

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ings of the Opening Session in the Long Parliament. For that reason, I have also modernized spelling and punctuation in quotations from Willson Coates’s Journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes [from October 12, 1641, to January 10, 1642]. I have done the same in quotations from the unpublished parts of the journal (Harley Manuscripts 163–66), but here I have cited folios using recto and verso rather than D’Ewes’s a and b. All manuscripts cited are in the British Library unless otherwise indicated.

An Industrious Mind

Introduction: “An Industrious Mind”

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

2

Introduction: “An industrious mind”

properly studied—in the context of D’Ewes’s letters, associations and actions and of his purposes in writing it.”1 This book attempts to provide the work that Sharpe described. Another vital interest for D’Ewes was British history because he intended to write a history of Britain from the earliest times up to his own. He made his first visit to the medieval records in the Tower of London in 1623 and quickly became fascinated by the documents he found there. His first sight of the two volumes of the Domesday book occurred in 1630, and he was quick to appreciate its importance and its uses. An avid purchaser and user of books and manuscripts, he modeled his collecting practices on those of his mentor, Sir Robert Cotton, and the Frenchman Jacques August de Thou (Thuanus). Despite his vigorous opposition to popes and Jesuits in particular and post-Tridentine Catholicism in general, one of his intellectual, literary, and spiritual heroes was the politique Catholic de Thou. That there were such things as “good papists” for D’Ewes indicates a nuance in his thinking that has often been ignored. D’Ewes’s library constitutes “nearly one-twelfth” of the famous Harleian manuscripts in the British Library.2 His collection, which he called his “paper treasury,” thus became a substantial building block in the British Library’s vast collection of manuscripts.3 D’Ewes is well known to historians of the early Stuart period not only because of his autobiography (edited and published by J. O. Halliwell in 1845) but also his lengthy journal of the Long Parliament.4 His library also contained more than seventy volumes of his personal papers, and these include (alongside much else) a massive collection of letters written by and to him between 1620, when he left Cambridge to begin his legal studies in London, and his death in 1650. No one else who lived in this era in Europe left us a record of a life that approaches his in chronological extent, range, depth, and variety. The letters concerning public events that he exchanged with Joachimi, de Laet, Sir Martin Stuteville, and many others afford us a lengthy and detailed commentary on their world. The record contains detailed information about D’Ewes’s upbringing, his schooling, his religious and political thinking, his antiquarian and other researches, his two marriages, his children (including their illnesses and wet-nurses), and his relations with his parents, his brother, and his sisters and their husbands. Although his unpublished papers have been dipped into by numerous historians for a wide variety of purposes, no one has yet focused on the man himself. He was not a hero or a harbinger of modernity, and there are reasons to dislike him. Puritanism, after all, had many enemies in his time and is not in vogue in ours. Yet as Sharpe rightly observed, D’Ewes’s writing “is perhaps most important for its demonstration of how worries about religion could lead a ‘political

Introduction: “An industrious mind”  

conservative’ to large anxieties about the state as well as the church.”5 There are good reasons to find him an interesting and indeed a fascinating person whose life, thought, experiences, feelings, and activities illustrate both his distance from and his nearness to us. Until his appointment as sheriff of Suffolk late in 1639, D’Ewes lived an altogether private life in Dorset, London, Cambridge, and Suffolk. In the autumn of 1640, he was elected to represent Sudbury, Suffolk, in the Parliament that began to sit on November 3. Still extricating himself from his shrievalty, he was unable to take his seat until November 19. Although a deeply conservative man in social and political terms, he resisted blandishments to join the Royalist side in the civil wars that began in 1642 and remained a Parliamentarian. Some of those appeals came from his brother, Richard, an officer in Charles I’s army, and part of the story that will be told in this book is that of brothers whose affection for each other and concern for each other’s welfare persisted despite political estrangement. Aside from Halliwell, the only writer who paid any attention to him before the twentieth century was John Bruce. In the Edinburgh Review (1846), Bruce wrote an engaging account of D’Ewes’s first appearance in the Long Parliament: He is introduced to the Speaker by Sir Nathaniel [Barnardiston], one of the members for Suffolk, and a distinguished leader amongst the Puritans. The new member is just thirty-eight years of age—a man of formal precise demeanour; quite self-possessed and self-satisfied [who, after greeting several members from Suffolk sitting nearby, takes] out pen, ink, and paper, commences Note-taking. This action reveals that he is near-sighted, and apparently has lost the sight of one eye.6

Bruce’s use of the censorious term “self-satisfied” and his characterization of D’Ewes’s “formal precise demeanour” hint at his view of the Suffolk MP. The two essays that he wrote on D’Ewes contain some shrewd insights and have much of value, especially given the fact that D’Ewes’s papers were ignored before 1845. Bruce, like many writers since, combined praise for the voluminous record D’Ewes left with making fun of or otherwise disapproving of the man himself. Consider, for example, Bruce’s summary of D’Ewes’s performance in the Long Parliament: And so he went on, day by day, constant in his attendance, always ready to talk, often talking the merest nonsense in the world, in a pompous grandiloquent way, altogether ludicrous; [and taking his notes] paper upon his knee, and ink hanging from his buttonhole, making History in a minute record of every thing that took place around him [and enabling us] . . . to know the Long Parl as thoroughly as if we had sat in it.7

Satirically, Bruce wrote that

3

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

Despite the amusement it provided Bruce, the fact is that in early modern England a man never wore a hat in the presence of a social superior and observance of the etiquette of the “covering” of heads was a serious matter. The fierce persecution of Quakers for their refusal to perform what they sneered at as “hat honor” later in the century must be recalled. What for Bruce was a risible punctiliousness was an unquestioned social norm for members of the landed aristocracy. Accounts of the trial of the earl of Strafford by both Edward Hyde, later earl of Clarendon, and Bulstrode Whitelocke discussed the procedural matter of hat wearing by MPs and peers. When the trial opened on March 22, 1641, Sir Thomas Peyton and D’Ewes were eyewitnesses that day. Peyton’s journal entry mentions that the “the House of Commons (being but a committee) was uncovered” (that is, hatless). D’Ewes’s entry for the day says nothing about hats or their absence.9 The placement of the mace was important because when it was not atop the table, the House of Commons was operating under committee rules, not House rules. In the former mode, known as a “Committee of the Whole House,” an MP could speak whenever the chairman recognized him; in the latter, he could speak only once on a bill in a particular session. Readings of bills and votes on them could occur only when the House was not in committee mode. What Bruce did not know was that the politics of the Stuart era cannot be understood if we ignore the procedures used in the House of Lords and the House of Commons and the subtle but complex social attitudes that underlay them and shaped them. Bruce obviously found it paradoxical that a man so obsessed by what he considered trivia nevertheless created a record of such great importance. Bruce clearly found D’Ewes himself preposterous: “D’Ewes’s demands upon the homage and patience of the House were excessive; and his appetite for adulation, ever craving and insatiable, increased by what it fed upon. He became a glutton, a very horse-leech, in his importunity for highly seasoned compliments to his erudition, and humble submission to the authority of his records.”10 In his other essay, Bruce displayed his skepticism about the conviction held by both Simonds and his father Paul that their family was descended from the aristocracy of Gelderland. He argued that Simonds’s “ruling passion” was “pride of ancestry” and “his

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strongest feeling, a longing to take rank among the old territorial gentry. For a man of such tastes his own pedigree was most annoying.” He therefore, Bruce continued, asserted that his immigrant forebear Adrian D’Ewes during Henry VIII’s reign “was a lord in disguise; and his ancestral stock one of great eminence in their native Guelderland” and “that Adrian came to England, not as a poor emigrant, but as a political exile; and that, on the restoration of peace, he intended to return and demand the restitution” of his lands and powers. “By perpetual reiteration, for it is a string upon which he was constantly harping, D’Ewes himself and his father probably came to believe this pretty tale.” Bruce was unconvinced.11 He decided that D’Ewes’s “greatest grief” derived from the way that his “noble stock” had been forced by “poverty . . . to hide their beams behind shop-counters, and carry on the humbler occupations of life, as if the D’Eweses had been no better than other men.”12 I will argue below that this assessment of D’Ewes is more caricature than fact and that D’Ewes’s “ruling passion” was not his social rank but his devotion to what he believed was “true religion.” Although Bruce set out to awaken interest in the extraordinary richness of the D’Ewes archive, his two articles set the tone for much that has followed and influenced the sardonic stance on D’Ewes taken by a series of historians. Consider, for example, John Cannon’s statement that D’Ewes was “a vociferous Presbyterian” and “a self-important snob” who “left published papers and historical works of great value.”13 When John Pym proposed an ordinance for a 20 percent tax on the income of landed men who had failed to give money to the parliamentary cause, Jack Hexter opined that D’Ewes’s opposition came from his “slightly dyspeptic conservatism.”14 Thinking of the numerous occasions on which D’Ewes predicted a woeful outcome of a proposal he disliked, Conrad Russell introduced an entry into his index under D’Ewes’s name headed simply “Greek chorus.”15 Many historians who have drawn upon the sources D’Ewes left us simply found him an unpleasant and difficult man. Like Bruce, Cannon obviously disliked D’Ewes while recognizing the importance of his documentary legacy. This schizoid perception has long persisted. Historians, although unable to resist sneering at his social pretensions, his limited sense of humor, and his thoroughgoing Puritanism, have found many valuable details in D’Ewes’s autobiography and used it to throw light on such topics as Cambridge life in the Jacobean era and the domestic side of the Puritan movement. They have also heavily mined his journal because it is the fullest source we have for what went on inside the Long Parliament. I will stipulate at the outset that at times D’Ewes deserved criticism for his pride, priggishness, pedantry, prolixity, and po-

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litical ineptitude. Thin-skinned, opinionated, austere, and severe he indubitably was, and his enemies found him an all too easy target. I believe, however, that Simonds D’Ewes is worth considerably more attention than he has so far received for four reasons. First, and except for the autobiography and the parliamentary journal, historians have for the most part ignored the huge collection of D’Ewes’s papers that has survived in good condition. Admittedly, his handwriting is a challenge, especially when one is trying to decipher the drafts of letters that he scribbled for his assistant to turn into fair copies for dispatch, or the sermon notes that he assumed only he would revisit. In the working drafts he wrote of letters and essays of various kinds, he often scratched things out and squeezed corrected words or phrases in between lines that were already close together. A reader of his papers is always grateful when he set himself to making a fair copy because he was perfectly capable of writing legibly, as he did in his autobiography (Harleian MS 646) and a number of other items. Indeed, his fair copies tell us much about what he considered really important. On these he trimmed his pen to produce a narrow line, but continued recutting his pens when he was writing drafts. The result was heavy, thick lines that bled ink through the sheet and make for difficult reading. The autobiography and the muchused Long Parliament journal, it turns out, are merely the tip of a documentary iceberg. These two works occupy only five of more than seventy volumes of manuscript material concerning D’Ewes and his large family and numerous friends. Many of the volumes consist wholly of correspondence most of which has gone unread by historians.16 When I stumbled into them in October 1999, I could scarcely believe my good fortune. D’Ewes’s extraordinary library was sold in 1705 by his grandson, also named Simonds. The sale only postponed his incarceration in the debtor’s prison, where he died in 1722. It was negotiated by Humphrey Wanley, an agent of Sir Robert Harley, the earl of Oxford. Parliament purchased Harley’s enormous collection from his heirs for the newly established British Museum in 1753.17 The D’Ewes library contained more than seven thousand manuscripts and an uncertain (but very large) number of printed books.18 Had the library remained in Stow Hall, the family manor house in northern Suffolk, as D’Ewes intended, it could have been damaged or spread far and wide by piecemeal sales. We might have access to only a fraction of the papers that make D’Ewes the individual whose life is more fully documented than any other individual in Britain (and perhaps even Europe as a whole) in the first half of the seventeenth century.19 In this circuitous way, the careful provision that he made in his will for scholars’ access to his library was fulfilled, although not in the way that he had

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hoped it would be. I estimate that D’Ewes’s personal papers contain more than fourteen hundred letters, as well as a huge number of sheets covered with the results of his antiquarian and historical researches, drafts of parts of essays and books he intended to write (but in most cases never completed), sermon notes, lists, juvenilia, school notebooks, diaries, and accounts. A single volume, Harley MS 379, for example, holds 114 letters that contain over 41,000 words, written between 1615 and 1643. In many cases, both sides of the correspondence are available because D’Ewes kept the letters he received and drafts of many of the letters he wrote in response. The mountain of material is so high that one wonders if he ever slept more than four hours a night. Another barrier to the use of his papers is the fact that the contents of many of the volumes that contain them are not itemized in the Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts. Harley MS 593, for example, is a large folio containing 227 sheets, but the eighteenth-century cataloger made no attempt to list its contents. He described it as “a book in fol. containing a Rhapsody of indigested Notes, collected or written by Sir Simonds D’Ewes.”20 But it contains numerous important insights into D’Ewes’s thinking. Harley MS 379 is labeled “Letters of Simonds D’Ewes,” and no information whatsoever about the writers of the letters, their dates, or their contents appears in the catalogue. Folios are itemized only in those volumes that contained what was defined as “public” or “state” matters. Other volumes were given titles such as “D’Ewes Family Letters,” and such “private” material goes undescribed. Many of these letters do, however, contain extensive statements about the religious and political issues that dominated the era. A sizable proportion of the letters and other papers therefore do not appear in either the Harleian or the British Library indices. This was what John Stoye had in mind when he referred to “the trackless wilderness of Sir Simonds D’Ewes’s correspondence.”21 They are, in effect, invisible unless one reads the “private” folios one by one and creates lists of the contents. In 1999, volume 379 happened to be the first one I opened. After just a few days of fascinating reading, I began to realize the magnitude of the task I was facing. But I found that I could not stop, because the varied ways in which D’Ewes’s entire life appeared slowly but steadily before me was too tempting to ignore. I was seeing people, events, ideas, and conflicts that I had read and taught and written about for more than thirty years through an entirely new and distinctive lens. Second, D’Ewes was a man with wide interests and many friends who spent much of his time in or near London. The fact that he clearly had many devoted kinfolk and friends mitigates his reputation as a disagreeable, arrogant prig. He held no public office before 1639. Had he been

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a hermit uninterested and uninvolved in the world around him, there would be little reason to write his biography, regardless of the quantity of his papers. He was, however, the opposite of a recluse. He was a keen observer of his surroundings, and he copiously recorded what he saw, heard, and thought about everything. He witnessed important royal ceremonies, such as the investiture of Prince Charles as prince of Wales in 1616, the first appearance of Queen Henrietta Maria at court in 1625, and the (supposedly private) coronation of Charles I as king in 1626. Because the Inns of Court where he studied the common law from 1620 to 1626 were filled with talkative men who spent much time in the company of courtiers, ambassadors, clergymen, and officials, he had only to keep his ears open to be very well informed. Those hostile to Puritans denounced them for having “itching ears” for theological novelties, and D’Ewes’s ears certainly itched for news and even gossip. For example, when James I died, he gathered information about the late king’s autopsy. Although his heart was in good condition and “his liver fresh as a yonge mans . . . one of his kydnyes very good but the other shrunke soo little as they could hardly find yt.”22 An August 1638 letter to his brother, Richard, reported that Suffolk’s former sheriff, Sir Anthony Wingfield, had died “of a spotted feaver,” leaving five young children and a large debt. Simonds speculated that “ther was excessiue drinking at his late summer Assizes, which perhaps sett his bloud on fire.”23 D’Ewes listened to Sir William Harvey’s lectures on anatomy and George Herbert’s on rhetoric. He frequently visited the famous library that Sir Robert Cotton was building at Westminster, worked closely with Cotton, and learned much about collecting books and manuscripts that applied to his own collection. He heard John Donne and many other eminent divines preach. He watched George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, in the company of the two kings who made him their favorite. He cultivated an extensive set of friends and contacts in England and beyond it, and with them he avidly exchanged news of public events. Even if he had not written an autobiography or kept a parliamentary journal, his papers provide an extraordinarily rich body of information about one well connected person’s consumption of the rapidly expanding body of “news” in early Stuart England. Horrified by the military losses of the anti-Habsburg states in the early phases of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), D’Ewes kept close tabs on troop movements, battles, and diplomacy while the titanic struggle proceeded. Like many devout English Protestants, he feared that Habsburg victory on the Continent would be followed by an invasion of England and the forcible reestablishment of Roman Catholicism. Through his letters and other papers, we can learn much about how news was collected, ana-

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lyzed, consumed, and disputed. One great advantage that D’Ewes enjoyed was his intimate friendship with Sir Albert Joachimi, the ambassador of the United Provinces to England. From soon after their meeting in 1626 until 1640, they exchanged long letters more or less fortnightly in Latin. His other long-standing correspondents included his father’s friend Sir Martin Stuteville of Dalham, Suffolk, and Johannes de Laet of Leiden, a scholar and a director of the Dutch West Indies Company as well as its historian. Newshound though he undoubtedly was, D’Ewes had other strings to his bow. He was an historian, antiquarian, genealogist, and numismatist, and his papers contain his notes on many projects alongside many letters to and from friends concerning them. There is even a warrant from Charles I himself in 1647 instructing his librarian at St. James to give D’Ewes free access to the royal coin collection and to provide a valuation of it. His Journals of all the Parliaments of Queen Elizabeth were edited by his nephew Paul Bowes and published in 1682. D’Ewes intended to write a history of England from the earliest times through the Norman Conquest of 1066, and his discoveries in the documents he studied in the Tower of London and other repositories shaped his religious and political outlook. He is often described as an antiquarian, which is fair enough so long as we remember Noah Millstone’s dictum that “in the early Stuart era, ‘antiquarian’ had not yet acquired its secondary meaning as ‘trivial.’ The entire premise of antiquarian work was applying the past to the present.” 24 D’Ewes was deeply engaged in the great conflict that culminated in the British civil wars in the 1640s, and his antiquarian research informed his understanding of that conflict and its place in the wider battles between “true” and “false” religion and just and tyrannical rulership. To discover such a rich archive and find so much of it barely touched was astonishing. To track this man’s thoughts for his entire adult life was an opportunity that I could not resist. Third, existing biographies for individuals who lived during this era tend to emphasize either private or public lives but rarely both, because the sources usually consist of one kind or the other. D’Ewes was part of a large family, and there are letters he wrote to and received from his kinfolk. These family members also figure frequently in his autobiography because he wrote it not for publication but for the use of successive generations of his family. I will offer reasons for thinking that he began drafting it in 1636 because he was having a debate with himself—but a debate that might have important consequences for his family—about whether to move to Massachusetts. An intimate picture emerges of his feelings about his choleric, difficult, and yet loving father and his saintly mother whose death when he was sixteen devastated him. His writings carefully trace

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his frustrating efforts to find a bride and tell the complicated story of his courtship with his first wife, Anne Clopton. The agonies they experienced when eight of their ten children fell ill and died are fully portrayed. When he married Anne in 1626, she was just thirteen and a half. She was sole heiress to her father’s estate and from an ancient landed family whose genealogy he researched thoroughly. It is difficult to tell whether her beauty, her piety, her money, or her lineage appealed to him most at the outset, but the union soon became a love match for them both. An orphan, Anne was the ward of her formidable grandmother, Dame Ann Barnardiston, who extracted a promise from Simonds not to have marital relations with her until she was older (a promise he kept for eight months after their wedding). In 1641 (after nine pregnancies), she contracted smallpox, and he obtained leave from the House of Commons and went to her in Suffolk. When everyone there believed that her crisis had passed and she would live, he returned to London. Her death soon after brought him near to madness in his terrible grief. He even constructed a questionnaire about precisely what had occurred hour by hour in the last days of her life that he required his steward to fill in after interrogating the servants. Four of Simonds’s sisters reached adulthood and married, and his correspondence with them and their husbands provides many insights into sibling relationships. When his father, Paul, died in 1631, Simonds had to supervise the upbringing of his brother, Richard, who was still a schoolboy. Their extensive correspondence during Richard’s travels on the Continent from 1637 to 1641 makes fascinating reading, especially in the context of the opposed political paths they would soon find themselves taking. Since the D’Ewes archive contains both “public” and “private” materials in abundance, the story of Simonds’s public and private “worlds” can be told in a thoroughly rounded way. Fourth, Simonds D’Ewes was a Puritan in an era during which Puritanism was an enormously powerful force politically, religiously, and culturally. The religious dimension is utterly central to D’Ewes’s story. He read widely and deeply in the history of Christianity, especially in Britain, and placed his thinking about the religious and political discord that dominated his own fraught times in a contested but plausible wider context, one shared by many of his contemporaries and fellow members of the Long Parliament. He was every inch a Puritan, and although we have many studies of Puritan preachers, the sources for writing about lay Puritans are minuscule compared with the thousands of published sermons and theological and devotional treatises produced by churchmen. Much of what scholars have written about religion in early modern England has been based heavily on these works, and this should cause no surprise.

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Clergymen were trained, professional theologians whose calling it was to preach what they believed was true Christian doctrine and to defend it in print with the products of their pens. My first book appeared in 1976, and about 90 percent of the sources for it were written by churchmen.25 Yet I wondered about what the lay “consumers” made of the tidal wave of sermons that flowed from the presses and about what they heard while sitting in their pews. What happened to the theology offered from the pulpit as it passed through the prism of lay experience, attitudes, and assumptions? When Puritans such as D’Ewes, Oliver Cromwell, and many others spoke and voted in the Long Parliament, what role did their religious convictions play in the decisions they made?26 It is easy to ask such questions but difficult to find sources that contain answers to them. The relative paucity of lay sources makes it the more surprising that there is no thorough analysis of D’Ewes’s religious outlook in print. Numerous valuable important studies of individual Puritan MPs have been published, but none of them even begin to rely on primary sources as extensive as those in the D’Ewes archive.27 John Morrill has rightly drawn attention to what he calls “the militancy of Puritanism in 1642” as a product of “the build-up of tension, or internalized anger, among the godly in the years before 1642.” He describes it as “the coiled spring effect” that gained its urgency from “the sense that the Protestant cause was being betrayed” in the late 1630s.28 D’Ewes not only perfectly exemplifies this effect, but also allows us to see how it grew over time in the mind of a particular individual in intellectual and experiential terms. This study of Simonds D’Ewes contributes to the exploration of lay religiosity in its highly politicized context in early Stuart England. D’Ewes inherited his commitment to what he called “true religion” (that is, high Calvinism) from his parents, and he built his own spirituality upon the foundation they had provided. Thanks to his abundant papers, we can observe at close quarters the making of a staunch lay Puritan and his development over a lifetime. The record shows that he did not spring, Minerva-like, into the world as a polished, finished Puritan. His spiritual odyssey was long and complex, and it had some idiosyncratic features. One important early step, which he related in his autobiography, occurred in his fourteenth year. From his schoolmaster in London, Mr. Henry Reynolds, he learned that merely hearing sermons was not enough. Reynolds impressed upon him the need “to take notes in writing at sermons,” and as he did so he became, as he put it, “a rationall hearer” of God’s word for the first time. Before this advance, he concluded that he “differed little from the brute creatures that were at church with mee, neuer regarding or obseruing anye parte of diuine seruice.”29

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Characteristically, upon achieving each step forward, D’Ewes disparaged much of what he had done before. His additional steps will be identified in subsequent chapters, but one must be mentioned here. The historical researches that he began in London in 1623 came to include by 1626 (if not sooner), the study of the early history of Christianity in Britain. From his reading of Gildas, Nennius, and other medieval writers, he discovered a narrative of the history of Christendom itself which could be mapped on to his own experience of the anti-Calvinism that was—to his horror—gaining adherents in England during the 1620s. He became convinced that “true religion” in his sense had been practiced among the Anglo-Saxons in England and Wales after their conquest of the Romans. This religion, like the Reformed Christianity that had blossomed under Edward VI, Elizabeth I, and James VI and I, had been sound and orthodox in both its soteriology and its liturgy. This meant that it had upheld the doctrine of salvation by faith alone and practiced worship that was free of “idolatry and superstition.” But the early British Christians had experienced the emergence of the pernicious heresy of free will in the form of Pelagianism. A Welsh monk named Morgan, who styled himself “Pelagius,” had introduced this heresy late in the fourth century, and it had gone on to infect much of Christendom. For a time in the middle of the fifth century in Britain, the Pelagian heresy had been stymied by the godly bishops who led what D’Ewes called “the Church Christian Orthodox and truly Catholike.”30 By the end of the sixth century, however, the advocates of this heresy reasserted themselves with the arrival of St. Augustine of Canterbury, who was sent to Britain by Pope Gregory I. In a February 1627 letter to a close friend, D’Ewes summarized his understanding of religious developments in the Anglo-Saxon period after the initial suppression of Pelagianism. Although, he wrote, Britain and Wales had “enioied the same true & pure religion wee now doe” until Pope Gregory I’s emissary, Augustine, arrived in England and “first conuerted the Pagan Saxons & then peruerted the Brittains true religion.” He then compared this picture with the one he saw around him in his own era and argued that Pelagianism had returned in the form of the theology “of brainsicke Arminius.”31 For Puritans such as D’Ewes, Charles I’s patronage of the “Laudian” or “Arminian” party of theologians in the Church of England represented a resurgence of the heretical free-will soteriology of Pelagius accompanied by an equally abhorrent revival of “popish” ceremonialism that was both idolatrous and superstitious. When, in 1637, William Laud stated in a famous speech given in the Court of Star Chamber that the “greatest place of God’s residence upon earth” was the altar, not the pulpit, D’Ewes

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was aghast. He wrote that the statement confirmed Laud’s “allowance and practice of the adoring or bowing to and towards the altar . . . which made mee euen tremble when I read it.”32 While Laud, made bishop of London in 1628 and archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, inserted his allies into bishoprics, headships of Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and other offices in the Church of England, D’Ewes and men like him faced difficult choices. Some immigrated to New England, and he was one of many who thought seriously about following them. It looked to him as though he might have to choose between persecution for conscience’s sake in England or flight to America. Stowlangtoft lay in the bishopric of Norwich, and in 1636 the new bishop of Norwich, Matthew Wren, introduced into his diocese what D’Ewes called “manie new & strange articles” not required by Elizabeth I and her bishops. He singled out those concerning altars as particularly offensive.33 Wren’s moves to enforce his visitation articles included confronting recalcitrant individuals on their own turf, and one such individual was D’Ewes. His bitter confrontation when Wren and one of his chaplains came to Stowlangtoft in October 1636 is described in detail in Chapter 5. They threatened him with punishment if he persisted in his resistance to the Laudian program. From the visiting clerics’ point of view, D’Ewes and his ilk held dangerously radical religious sympathies. For his part, D’Ewes deeply resented any suggestion that his religious views were in any sense heterodox or novel and charged instead that the Laudians had begun in 1630 to “to increase the multitude & burthen of the ceremonies & intermixtures in the church, that soe they might oppress the consciences, or ruine the estates of manie godly Christians, falselie by them nick-named Puritans, although free from all schismaticall and idle opinions.”34 It must be stressed that D’Ewes was never an enemy to church government by bishops in principle. He counted bishops among his friends and greatly admired many of them. What infuriated him was that the “godly bishops” were being replaced by the “impious” ones, and if the process could have been reversed, he might have remained loyal to episcopacy. He did not become its opponent until he concluded it was past rescue. When D’Ewes sought election to the Long Parliament, he did so in the fierce conviction that the “impious bishops” had to be brought down and the Church of England restored to the doctrine it had held and the worship it had practiced during his parents’ lifetime, his own youth, and among the ancient Britons. On the very eve of his departure for service as MP for Sudbury, he wrote to a Cambridge friend and said that he fully expected to face the “hatred” of “the impious bishops and the whole crowd of the heterodox” when he exposed their “ikon slavery and impious opinions

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against the grace of God, and their tyrannical rule, . . . my conscience forcing me on.”35 In social and constitutional terms D’Ewes was conservative, and his conscience drove him to fight not for a new Church of England but for its restoration to the purity he believed it had enjoyed in earlier times. In both church and state, he believed himself a defender of precedent. He embodied one of the varieties of religious zeal that mightily strengthened the Parliamentarian party in the early 1640s, however disenchanted he became with the direction of events later on. His religious beliefs had profound political consequences, and by understanding these beliefs—in the holding of which he was very far from alone—the causation and course of the civil wars in Britain can be more firmly grasped. This book has a straightforward chronological structure. Chapter 1 (1602–20) describes D’Ewes’s birth, childhood, and education. Chapter 2 (1620–26) concerns the years of his study of the common law of England at the Middle Temple in London. I here introduce five subsections, each treating an important aspect of his activities: legal study, historical/antiquarian research, news and politics, spirituality, and private life. D’Ewes was called to the bar in 1623 and appeared headed for a legal career. He followed the course of the parliaments of the 1620s with intense interest. Historians who have relied only on his autobiography will be surprised to learn that a diary he kept from 1622 to 1624 and letters written during the final years of James I’s reign show him to have been a severe critic of James and an admirer of Prince Charles. The autobiography, written in 1636–38, tells a different story. Chapter 3 (1626–31) drops the law but retains the other four categories listed above. They recur in the remaining chapters because they were important to him for the rest of his life. It treats the early years of his marriage to Anne Clopton, a marriage that freed him from the need to practice law. Instead, he devoted much of his time to enhancing his library and pursuing his varied scholarly projects from 1626 until his father, Paul, died in 1631. But he kept up his close observation of foreign and domestic political and religious news and continued, again unlike what the autobiography of a decade later suggests, to have had high hopes for the young King Charles. Simonds attributed the failure of the 1628 Parliament to the Machiavellian maneuvers of men he called the “fiery spirits.” Readers of his Long Parliament journals rightly think of the “fiery spirits” as the radicals of 1640 and thereafter, but it turns out that in 1628–29 he had in mind such anti-Calvinists as bishops Neile and Laud. By the time of Paul D’Ewes’s final illness early in 1631, Simonds and his young bride must have been looking forward to an enjoyable dominion over Stow Hall. Chapters 4 and 5 describe their lives from 1631 to

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1639, a period in which he remained a private person and took pleasure in building up his library and stocking his mind with its contents. But bitter quarrels with Richard Damport, the rector of St. George Stowlangtoft, led them to periods of residence in Bury St Edmunds and Lavenham to escape Damport’s hostility. These alternated with truces during which they returned to Stow Hall but lived fearing that the truce with the rector would break down. Yet the biggest threats they faced in the 1630s were in part domestic (the death of one tiny child after another) and in part public (the advance of Laudianism in England and the perilous state of “the Protestant cause” internationally). Chapter 6 (1639–40) begins a survey of the only period in Simonds D’Ewes’s life during which he held public office. In November 1639, the king appointed him sheriff of Suffolk. A year later he was elected to what became the Long Parliament, and the chapter concludes with his initial weeks as an MP. Chapter 7 continues the examination of his work as an MP through July 1642 and the devastating death of his first wife in July 1641. Chapter 8 describes his continuing activity at Westminster, his second marriage, in September 1642, the terrible loss of his brother in April 1643, and the remainder of his political career and life. John Bruce thought that D’Ewes’s humiliation in July 1642 by the “fiery spirits” intimidated him and that his influence on the Long Parliament’s deliberations ebbed away as a result. But I argue that his knowledge of law and history from many years of archival research and his love of justice made him a more dangerous critic of their agenda than has been realized. In 1645, the Leveller publisher Richard Overton published a short treatise penned by D’Ewes entitled The Primitive Practise for Preserving Truth that demonstrates his sympathy with the opponents of the Presbyterian movement. He had written it in 1636 or 1637 as an attack on Laudian clericalism but had been prevented from publishing it. It shows that his religious thinking was by no means as conservative as has been assumed. He lived during one of the most violent and tumultuous periods of Britain’s history, and he was not only a well-placed observer and recorder of the famous events but also a participant in many of them. Even as late as 1645, he was by no means a burnt-out political case, and he was still regarded as a sufficiently dangerous enemy of the victorious Roundhead army’s agenda to be among those arrested during Pride’s Purge on December 6, 1648. D’Ewes and his friend Sir Edward Dering shared many antiquarian and genealogical interests and served together as members of the Long Parliament. Earlier, in 1633, the king had tried to force landowners to reside on their country estates rather than in London, and D’Ewes was bereft at having his access to the historical documents stored in London cut

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off. As he wrote to Dering on May 9 of that year, he was suffering “in the first place by being sequestred from those fountaine heads of inestimable records,” and in the second from the opportunity to talk to “my learned familiars” such as Dering. Restricted to an epistolary conversation with Dering, his letter provided a detailed description of “an ancient MS” he had discovered in the papers of his wife’s late father, one that he knew would interest Dering because it cast new light on aspects of his friend’s ancestry and his coat of arms. He added that he knew that Dering would want to know about anything that increased the accuracy and completeness of his knowledge of his family tree, because just “as it is an adequate object for an able iudgment soe is it a iust imploiment for an industrious mind.”36 Whatever else one might conclude about Simonds D’Ewes, it cannot be denied that he had “an industrious mind.” Despite his quirks and flaws, he was a man utterly devoted to his family and friends. He was kind, loving, and generous in his dealings with them. He was no less devoted to his nation and its “ancient constitution” and to his faith, although the latter took primacy. His story is a vivid, intricate, and interesting one—very much worth the telling.

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“A rationall hearer”—1602–1620

1

In the very first few sentences of the autobiography that he wrote between 1636 and 1638, Simonds D’Ewes described his own birth and also—as was his wont—linked it to his faith and his nation. “I was borne through the mercie and prouidence of my gracious God (who hath hitherto preserued mee) at Coxden in the parish of Chardstocke” in Dorset on Saturday December 18, 1602, at about five in the morning. D’Ewes added that his birth occurred in the forty-fifth year of the reign of “that inestimable virgin Monarke Queen Elizabeth of Blessed memory.” Her life ended just over three months later “to the exceeding greife of her deare subjects at home, & her faithfull allies abroad.” At the time of his birth, his parents, Paul and Sissilia D’Ewes, were visiting at Coxden, the estate of Sissilia’s parents, Richard and Johanna Simonds. The infant, who had been conceived there during an earlier stay, was baptized on December 29 in the gallery of their manor house. The vicar of Chardstock baptized him at home rather than in the parish church because of the bitterly cold weather.1 Sissilia was an only child, and through her the manor of Coxden later descended to Simonds. He stated that his parents and grandparents saw in him “the hope of continuing both ther names and families” and that his maternal grandfather treated him as though he was “his owne sonne begotten by himselfe.” That was why his godparents (his uncle and his grandfather) gave them “ther owne sirname for my name of baptisme.”2 Indeed, so intense was his grandfather’s interest that it produced one of the few jokes Simonds related in his entire autobiography—though the jest was of his mother’s making rather than his own. His father, he reported, told of the “pretty speach” his mother had made when he arrived at Coxden from London during the midsummer vacation in 1602. Sissilia told her husband that she was pregnant, and he pronounced himself delighted at the prospect at the “new likelihood of moore issue.” She responded that “I am

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with childe, but this is none of youres.” Since she was “an exemplarie patterne of pietie and virtue,” his father understood that she was joking. She then “explained her owne riddle,” saying that her father hoped to raise Simonds in Dorset since the lad had been “begotten” in his own house.3 And so it came to pass, at least for much of his youth. Sissilia Simonds and Paul D’Ewes had married late in 1594, just two weeks after her fourteenth birthday, and Simonds believed that “her partaking somewhat too soon of the rites of marriage” made it unlikely that she would ever bear children. J. O. Halliwell, a vigorous bowdlerizer, omitted this phrase from the version of D’Ewes’s autobiography that he published in 1845, and six years elapsed before the birth of their first child, Johanna.4 Simonds’s arrival two years later was understandably a cause of great rejoicing. Yet the happiness that his birth created for his family was not unalloyed. As would so often happen later in his life, “it pleased God to add some intermixture of affliction vnto this ther ioy.” The only midwife available was a woman “whose necke was distorted” on one side, and her appearance so distressed Sissilia that she would have sought the help of another if time had permitted. Perhaps because this woman resented his mother’s reaction to her, during the birth she so “exceedingly bruised & hurt my right eye” that it was feared that he would lose the eye altogether. Thanks to “the blessed assistance of a higher prouidence,” Simonds recovered from the bruise, but the damage to his “opticke facultie” in his right eye was such that although he could see large objects with it, he “could neuer make anye vse of it to read or write.”5 As we shall see, Simonds and his wife would later suffer intense anguish over the deaths of their own babes, and they often wondered whether their tragic losses were caused by mistakes they made in the choice of midwives and wet-nurses. Simonds enumerated a series of mishaps he suffered during his childhood, some of them so dangerous that his family doubted that he would reach adulthood. At the end of April 1603, when he was nearly six months old, his father insisted that his wife and child travel from Dorset back to London with him. Only twenty miles into the journey, the baby was so agitated by the “the continuall iogging of my fathers coach in those craggy & vneuen wayes” that his life was feared for, and they stopped in Dorchester. They were forced to leave him with a nurse, although his mother remained there with him for nearly a fortnight until he appeared to be out of danger. She had nursed him from the time of his birth until she had to leave for London.6 While in Dorchester, he suffered an injury that left “a large & deepe depression” on the left side of his skull for the rest of his life.7 His grandfather brought him back to Coxden, where he remained until 1610. But he nearly drowned in a rain-swollen stream when he was

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still dressed “in coates.” He suffered a severe case of the measles during which he bled so copiously that that his death seemed imminent. He also chased a ball under one of his grandfather’s coach horses, and everyone was terrified that the animal “would haue dashed out my braines with a kicke.” Instead they rejoiced “when they saw God had soe wonderfully preserued mee.”8 Not all the dangers Simonds experienced in his youth stemmed from accidents and illnesses. His grandfather, a lawyer, spent much of his time in London. His “affectionate & indulgent grandmother” weakened to the point that she could not effectively govern the household. Misbehavior ensued, including “drinking swearing & corrupt discourses,” not least because it was his grandfather’s habit to stock his cellar with “sider strong beere & seuerall wines.” Simonds wrote that when he was only seven years old he “dranke soe liberally of them all” that his blood became “enflamed” and was followed by a fever, “which brought mee very neare my graue.”9 The fever and a youthful hangover might have been unconnected, but Simonds remembered it so.

Early Schooling in Dorset After his return to Coxden from Dorchester, Simonds lived with his grandparents and, for varying periods, with Richard White, the vicar who had baptized him and was his first schoolmaster. He acknowledged that Mr. White got him off to a good start on “the exact spelling & reading of English” and that he “sometimes tooke care to purge out atheisme from mee, & to aduize mee to a reuerent & high esteeme of the scriptures.” All that was to the good, but Simonds also later concluded that White was so indulgent that “I found little amendment of anye of my errors by residing with him.” He attributed that terrible fever that had afflicted him for nearly two months to White’s failure to stop him from indulging in the contents of Coxden’s cellar. An excellent physician who lived nearby was so fearful about the boy’s health at that point that he warned grandfather Simonds that the lad might die. Nevertheless, “through Gods mercie,” Simonds recovered and regained his “former fauour & flesh (which my long sicknes had almost reduced to a scheletone).” In early October 1610, his grandfather took him to London and then on to the D’Ewes residence at Welshall in Suffolk. Not quite having reached the age of eight, Simonds did not then realize that this visit to Suffolk might prove permanent. Indeed, he recalled that he loved Coxden “aboue all others,” and his grandparents “much moore dearely then my parents themselues.” He remembered with sadness the tears his grandmother had shed when he took his leave of her. She had suspected, he later realized, that they would not meet again on earth.10

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An accident occurred on the journey to London that came to have a totemic significance for Simonds. In the stableyard of an inn, the Red Lion at Blandford in Dorset, he ran “like a true childe” to catch birds “picking vpon the dunghill,” but it turned out to be a pit into which he fell and nearly drowned in dung. He acknowledged that “there scarce lives any man but hath escaped sickness and danger in his infancy.” Yet he later became convinced that the fact that he survived “soe manye seuerall hazards” was “almost past beleife.” He became convinced that his life had been repeatedly preserved so that he could “liue to doe good seruice both to Church & commonwealth” and that “God had not deliuered mee out of soe many perils but to some publike end.” Although “euill times” presaged “a speedy ruine to truth & piety,” Simonds determined that God himself would decide whether he would serve that end by “doing or suffering”; his responsibility was to give himself up entirely to divine providence.11 This was, to be sure, the way he viewed his early life between 1636 and 1638 when he was writing his autobiography, and he would not have claimed that he had any inkling of such things at age eight. Indeed, at the time, he emitted “a whole volly of teares” in an effort to get his grandfather to take him back to Coxden. But grandfather Simonds, “mastering his affection by his wisedome,” persuaded him to remain in Suffolk with his parents while promising that a return to Dorset would come in due course. Simonds wrote, “I tooke my sorrowfull farewell of him; which, no doubt would haue been much moore dolefull had wee but guessed that this would haue proued the last time of our parting.” On the following day he reached his parents’ home at Welshall. When he arrived, his mother was walking through the hall into the kitchen, and he hurried “towards her & suddenly kneeling downe to craue her blessing; she was so ouer-ioyed with the unexpected sight of mee” that she cried out three times so loudly that his two sisters and some neighbors who were nearby in the parlor rushed in to help her, “fearing shee had been, in some great and eminent perill.” They quickly understood the cause of her shouts and joined with Sissilia in her excitement.12 Initially Simonds enjoyed Welshall, mainly because he received “indulgent affection” from his mother and enjoyed being with his two sisters, Jone, who was two years older, and Grace, who was two years younger. When, however, he realized that he would not soon return to Coxden, it was rare for him to be “soe chearelie as before.” What he called his “disconsolation” heightened when his father came home from London for the Christmas holidays. Paul D’Ewes’s “carriage” toward him was, he acknowledged “no other then became a father,” but it was so unlike the “tender respect” his grandfather gave him that he often wished himself back

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in Dorset. Since there was a “good schoolemaster” at the nearby market town of Lavenham, he was sent there and met for the first time his “fellow schollers,” the sons of leading Suffolk families such as the Barnardistons and Cloptons. It was in Lavenham that he receiving the devastating news that his “aged and affectionate grandmother” had died at Coxden on February 16, 1611. Afterward, he “mourned bitterly.” He dreamed frequently that she still lived, and he conversed with her in his dreams.13 On June 24, 1611, a terrible storm hit England, so devastating that many “thought verily the day of iudgment” had arrived. Many parents came to the school to take their sons home in order to pray for deliverance. Trees in the orchard at Coxden were blown down. His grandfather, traveling homeward from Salisbury during another storm a few days earlier, had been soaked to the skin and contracted “a feuer & the cholick.” He died on June 27, and Simonds’s parents sent for him on June 30 to join them in London, where they gave him the sad news. He found his mother “almost drowned in teares for the losse of soe dear & louing a father,” and he tried to pretend it was not true. “I would in noe case beleeue it. For now my afflictions came soe thicke vpon mee, as I euen feared to make my selfe further miserable by beleeuing this.”14 On their way to Dorset for the funeral, they stopped at the same inn at Blandford where he had nearly drowned in the stableyard only eight months earlier. There, the reality of the loss began to sink in when he saw the innkeeper and his wife trying to comfort his mother not only for her personal loss but also about “the great want the whole cuntry [county] would soon finde of him.” At Coxden he found “a desolate and mournfull familie,” and he regretted that he had nothing “to embrace of my deare deceased grandfather but his ensabled coffin, & liueles corps, enclosed in it.” In later years, Simonds often lamented “that there was neuer anie picture taken of him.”15 The prose picture that Simonds inserted in his autobiography was nevertheless an evocative one. His grandfather, he wrote, was “of a most comelie aspect and excellent elocution,” so much so that when the county’s justices of the peace convened at the quarterly sessions he “ordinarilie gave the charge.” Aged sixty-one when he died, Richard Simonds had been a tall man “of personage proper” with “a full face . . . and a large grey eye, bright & quicke.” He had an excellent memory, “a sound & deepe iudgment,” and “well composed language and gracefull deliverie.” As a young man, he had been “somewhat prodigallie enclined,” but he later made up for it by “giuing good example to his greatest neighbours by his constant hospitalitie” and being generous in “the releife of the distressed, & mercifull to the poore.” He had “little academicall learning” but was deeply informed about the “the Municipal Lawes of the Realme.”

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His will, dated January 14, 1608, made young Simonds the sole heir to “a great personall estate in readie monie, debts . . . leases, Householdstuffe and other goods and chattels.” However, Richard Simonds had made Paul D’Ewes his executor, and therefore Simonds during his minority benefited little because his father granted him a small allowance that was “no moore, then hee in his owne prudence thought fitt.” The consequence was that he experienced “wants and necessities” during his youth, but he eventually concluded that the result was “to my great good.” The deprivations forced him “to gett an humble heart in a good measure, to avoid ill companie, to follow my studies moore closelie, & to value secret praier with other holie duties at the higher rate.”16 The resignation and equanimity Simonds expressed here about this matter was not, as we shall see, maintained throughout his youth. There would be times when he found his father’s tightfistedness was so galling that he could not restrain himself from expressing his resentment of it. Soon after his grandfather’s death in 1611, the D’Ewes family suffered yet another loss. Their property at Welshall was awarded to a widow who claimed title to the lands on the grounds that her late husband had sold it to Paul D’Ewes even though it was part of her jointure and not his to sell. She then occupied Welshall until her own death in August 1632, a year and a half after Paul’s death. Simonds reported that his father attributed this reverse to usurious loans he had made and considered it “a iust punishment for the practice of that controversiall sinne.”17 Paul and Sissilia debated whether to send Simonds to school in Lavenham or Dorset. He begged his mother to allow him to stay in Dorset for the next phase of his schooling, and she acquiesced.18 His original schoolmaster, Richard White, had retired from teaching, and so, after due investigation, they chose a school at nearby Wambroke run by Christopher Malaker. Simonds remained there from 1611 to 1614. His mother and sisters spent half of 1612 at Coxden, and in that interval Simonds related that he experienced at least some “of that pleasant and comfortable life” he had enjoyed with his grandparents.19 While at Wambroke, the eleven-year-old Simonds experienced “the first publike greife” he could remember being aware of—the demise of James I’s eldest son, Prince Henry, on November 6, 1612. The ensuing lamentation was so widespread that “euen women and children” joined it. He related the rumor that Henry died because, while playing tennis, he had eaten poisoned grapes, and he hinted that the poisoners were part of a Roman Catholic conspiracy. As we shall see, D’Ewes was quick to suspect the use of poison, thus providing additional evidence for Hugh Trevor-Roper’s dictum that “whenever any great man died, poison was

“A rationall hearer”—1602–1620  

suspected—especially if he was the enemy of the King of Spain or the Jesuits.”20 The prince had resisted a marriage of his sister, Princess Elizabeth, into the Howard family of powerful, Catholic-leaning courtiers. Henry, Simonds asserted, had been “a sound protestant, abhorring not only the idolatrie superstition & bloudy persecutions of the Romish synagouge, but being free alsoe from the Lutheran leauen, which had then soe farr spread it selfe in Germanie, & hath since ruined it.” Moreover, he had been a “true louer of the English nation” and surrounded himself with “learned and godly men” instead of “buffones & parasites . . . vaine swearers & Atheists.” Indeed, if “our sinnes” had not “caused God to take from us soe peareles a Prince,” Roman Catholicism might have been altogether “purged out” of the British isles.21 No wonder that Henry was deeply mourned, for it was “as if with him our religion, liberties & future safeties had died.” This judgment was based on the opinions Simonds acquired during the 1620s and 1630s, and we will investigate the basis for them below, but note should here be taken of a central theme in his mature religious and political position. He would become an arch-Calvinist for whom the true “Church of God” was the international Calvinist movement, a movement that Luther’s successors in central Europe had betrayed. Simonds would come to interpret the Thirty Years’ War and other events at home and abroad in terms of the advance of “popery” (and its consort in his eyes, Arminianism) and the (temporary) retreat of religious truth. People mourned Henry’s death, he asserted, because his days were “abortiuely shortened by a wicked hand,” just like those of Henry IV (“Henry the Great”) of France on May 14, 1610, when he was stabbed to death in his coach in Paris by the “Jesuited” assassin François Ravaillac. D’Ewes even recalled an ancient precedent, the alleged poisoning in a.d. 19 of “that braue Germanicus,” a Roman general who had campaigned against the German rebel Arminius.22 This was the first but far from the only time that D’Ewes would attribute Calvinist setbacks to agents of wickedness. In 1611, Paul D’Ewes bought Lavenham Hall with some of the money Simonds had inherited from his grandfather. In 1613, Paul wanted to accept a generous offer of £3,000 for Coxden, but Sissilia rejected the proposal and the land continued to be leased to a tenant.23 Simonds, meanwhile, remained in Mr. Malaker’s school, where his study of Latin began. By the time he left Dorset in November 1614, he had thoroughly studied many classical Latin authors and could “write theames epistles & dialougs” and “discourse a little in that tounge.” Like White before him, however, Malaker failed miserably in one important respect. Although a cleric, in Simonds’s recollection he had no concern for “the soules of his

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schollers.” This was because he never required his students to “to take notes of his sermons in writing” or be able to relate anything they had learned from the sermons. Simonds attended church every Sunday, but he depicted himself as never considering “what was read praied or preached: but spent my time in Gods house as profanelie as I did out of it, euen vpon his owne day.” Looking back from 1638, he opined that “I cannot but with horrour consider the desperate Atheisme I then liued in.”24 By atheism, he meant not a principled position against the existence of God but a life lived as if there were no God and therefore no punishment for sinful behavior or heterodox belief. The word was used similarly by William Gurnall, a preacher Simonds would install as rector of Lavenham in 1644. In his very popular treatise The Christian in Compleat Armour (1655), Gurnall wrote: “Being by a neighbour excited to thank God for a rich crop of corn, . . . [he] atheistically replied, ‘Thank God? nay rather, thank my dung-cart.’”25

London and Suffolk Joining his family in the Six Clerks’ Office in Chancery Lane (his father’s place of business), Simonds celebrated the Christmas season of 1614. By this time he had four sisters. In January 1615 he resumed his education at the school of Mr. Henry Reynolds in St. Mary Axe parish in London. His mother greatly admired Abraham Gibson, then preacher to the lawyers of the Inner and Middle Temples, and the suggestion to study under Reynolds came from him. Simonds wrote that she had first encountered Gibson in Essex early in her marriage and become acquainted with “his paines & diligence in his calling & his wittie & pleasant conversation. Hee prooued to mee alsoe a uerie loving and faithfull freind, euen to his dying day, euer after this my first acquaintance with him.”26 Paul D’Ewes purchased the Suffolk manor of Stowlangtoft, about ten miles northeast of Bury St Edmunds, in 1614 and moved his family there.27 In 1618, Gibson left London to become the rector at Kediton, Suffolk, the home of the Barnardistons. He continued to serve as a friend and counselor to Simonds and his mother.28 In 1624 Gibson would play a critical role in Simonds’s spiritual development. Simonds respected the formidable learning of Mr. Reynolds’s eldest daughter “Bathshuah” (or Bathsua), who had “an exact knowledg” of Greek, Latin, and French and “some insight” into Hebrew and Aramaic as well. He thought her more learned than her father and that her fame brought to his school “many schollers” who would not otherwise have remained or come at all. However much he fell short of his daughter’s linguistic skills, Henry Reynolds employed a most unusual method with his students, one that Simonds labeled “a pleasing way of

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teaching.” Reynolds kept a rod and a ruler as symbols of his authority, but he rarely used them to thwack his students. Instead, he encouraged deserving students “with raisons of the sunne or other fruit” and punished the lazy boys by denying them treats.29 Under Reynolds’s tutelage, Simonds made good progress at writing prose in Latin and could compose rather “large theames & epistles; with verses to them,” which he could not do before. He also made further advances in Greek and French and “learned to write a good Romane secretarie & greek hande.”30 Exercise books from this period of Simonds’s schooling contain fair copies he made of passages from various Greek and Roman writers (including Virgil, Ovid, Caesar, and Cicero) and his translations of them. A draft, dated August 17, 1615, of what may have been the first letter he wrote survives on the final leaf of one of these books: Most deare and lovinge Mother my humble duty remembred vnto and to my most prudent father, with my hearty commendations to all my sisters, hoping to god you are in good health with all your househould for the which I doe dayly pray I humbly thanke for the devine letter of graue counsell you sent knowing I shall neuer bee able to requite the least part of kindenesses, yet I haue emboldened my selfe to write this rude letter vnto you, to let you vnderstand that I am not vnmindefull of my duty to you for so doth bid the lawes of God and man, . . . your most obedient and studious sonne Symonds Dewes31

His interest in public affairs, originally stimulated by the death of Prince Henry in 1612, continued to grow during this time in London. On December 26, 1615, he sent a brief digest of foreign news in a letter to a correspondent.32 Simonds made his first visit to his family’s new home in Suffolk at Whitsuntide in 1615. He found Stow Hall near the village of Stowlangtoft so attractive that he began to become a Suffolk man and forget Coxden. When he later perused the second volume of the Domesday book in the Exchequer Office, he traced the ownership of the manor from Norman times.33 He learned of the birth of his brother at Stow on October 14 after his return to Reynolds’s school in London. This was his mother’s first pregnancy in five years, and she and her husband had feared she would have no more. Sissilia, on her own because Paul was in London, chose the name Richard for the child “because hee had a full grey ey like vnto her owne father.”34 Richard would prove to be a loving brother but a political enemy when civil war approached in 1642. On December 16, 1615, Simonds had just turned thirteen when he wrote another letter to his mother. He told her that he had hoped to accompany his father on his journey home from London, but “it pleased not my ffather, to whome I must al-

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wayes shew my selfe obedient.” He did not quite succeed in suppressing a certain pride in his burgeoning piety. For his father, he enclosed what he called “a small newyears gift, which is a few verses being the fruits of my learning.” To his mother he sent a lengthier gift, “a Sermon of my own collecting, which I hope will be as acceptable and pleasing unto you as my ffathers verses unto him.”35 The several folios that followed in his youthful hand faithfully reported the sermon he had heard on Matthew 8:32, the story of Jesus’s vanquishing of devils into a herd of Gadarene swine that then plunged into the sea and drowned. Mr. Reynolds, unlike his earlier teachers, encouraged spiritual growth in his students. He taught Simonds how “to take notes in writing at sermons,” and the young man praised his schoolmaster for helping him to take the important step forward of becoming what he called “a rationall hearer” of the word of God. He valued this because he realized that previously he had “differed little from the brute creatures that were at church with mee, neuer regarding or obseruing anye parte of diuine seruice.” He also recalled that for many years he had frittered away “the latter parte of the Lordes day in vaine & idle recreations which had been verie fitt & laudable vpon another day.” Yet he also wrote that by reading the Scriptures and memorizing many passages, by age fourteen he commanded “a great measure of knowledg in the verie bodie of diuinitie” and was able to express “seuerall formes of extimporarie praier; which I was able not onlie to make vse of in secret being alone, but euen in a familie alsoe before others.”36 Presumably, Simonds first exercised these gifts in front of Reynolds’s family and his fellow scholars in London, although the family from which he came was one in which such precocious piety would have been admired​­­ and encouraged. His grandfather had made sermon notes that Simonds­­retained, including statements such as this one: “That communion of Saynts which wee belyve to be betwyne the saynts in heaven and the saynts on earth, is the cause of al Saynts hollyday.”37 Simonds’s papers contain a considerable quantity of notes on sermons and other religious matters made by his father. These included a sheet headed “of the Lords Prayer,” which, in Paul’s tiny, execrable hand, contained references to Bodin, Bonaventure, Augustine, Origen, Gregory of Nazianzus, and others. It condemned the “Papists” for their “vaine repetitions” of prayers, their unscriptural practice of praying to saints, “ther kneeling to s[ain]ts, knocking ther breasts, bowing ther bodies & the like.”38 Before turning to legal studies at the Middle Temple, Paul D’Ewes had listened attentively to Laurence Chaderton’s preaching in Cambridge. A more impeccable mentor for Elizabethan and Jacobean Puritans than Chaderton would have been hard to find. Paul’s sermon notes contain anti-Catholic and Puritan themes. For example, he

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recorded one in which the charismatic Chaderton argued that St. Paul chastised the Christians of Corinth for taking the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper “piecemeale” instead of remaining present until all the communicants had received. Indeed, any person who left too soon was “guiltye of the vnworthy receaving of ye lords supper.” This was because God wanted “all the whole number of the faithfull to be assembled together,” and therefore the “masse of the papists wherin the priests eat all alone is a great abuse of this sacrament.”39 Simonds’s mother was no less a Puritan than his father. Early in their marriage, they lived for a time at Maldon in Essex, where the curate was George Gifford (1547/8–1600). In the late sixteenth century, Maldon was a “center of advanced Protestantism,” and Gifford underwent suspension in 1584 for refusing to wear the surplice and other acts of nonconformity. He went to the Netherlands, where he attended Sir Philip Sidney on his deathbed, and he was reinstated at Maldon in 1589. During the 1580s and 1590s, he published a series of sermons and treatises that earned him a reputation as “one of the most prolific and influential of godly writers.”40 From Gifford, whom Simonds described as “a verie learned powerful & godlie preacher,” his mother gained “soe much knowledge & comfort from his publike labour in the pulpit” and his private conversations that he placed her on “such a course for the future for the encreasing of her knowledge & faith & the constant practice of godlie life; as I may say without all partialitie of affection say & say trulie; shee was scarce second to anie of her sex then living for pietie & goodnes.”41 Sissilia’s above-mention­ed affection for Abraham Gibson’s preaching and counsel further supports the conclusion that Simonds could not have escaped a Puritan upbringing if he had wanted to, and it is evident that he admired her care for the religious education of himself and his siblings. The young Puritan did not spend all of his time in London studying, assiduous though he was, and his piety did not prevent him from taking a keen interest in what went on at the royal court. His autobiography includes a lengthy narration of the scandal that ensued in the autumn of 1615 upon the discovery of the fatal poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury at the instigation of the countess of Somerset, wife of James I’s favorite, Robert Carr, earl of Somerset. The fall of Somerset cleared the way for the rise of George Villiers, soon to be, successively, earl, marquess, and duke of Buckingham. The narrative includes several phrases that Halliwell found too salacious to print in 1845.42 For example, Simonds heard that after their conviction for Overbury’s murder, Somerset never had marital relations with his wife because she “was disabled by the secret punishment of a higher prouidence from being capable of further copulacion; &

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that though she liued neare vpon twentie yeares after it, yet her husband, the Earle of Somerset, neuer knew her carnallie, but the saied infirmitie encreased moore & moore vpon her till at last shee died of it in verie great extremitie.”43 Halliwell cut the italicized words from his edition. On November 4, 1616, Simonds went to Whitehall in the afternoon. That morning, the ceremony investing Prince Charles as Prince of Wales had been held, and Simonds saw the prince “in his coronet & roabes” while King James watched from a gallery. Several ambassadors and “the Earl of Buckingham his favourite” were with the king. Later Simonds “had a moore perfect sight” of the favorite because the king sent him down to convey a message to Prince Charles. Simonds was “standing verie neare the Princes chaire all the time” and so could see their “little discourse, but intermixed with many mutuall smiles.” Next to the king at the table sat his cousin, the duke of Lennox, and the earl of Southampton served as Charles’s cupbearer while the earl of Dorset was his carver.44 This was the first of many court ceremonies that Simonds would observe over the years and analyze for their political implications. Despite the progress he made under Mr. Reynolds, Simonds wrote that he suffered “much affliction” as a result of “emergent grudges” that arose between them. It is not clear what these were, but they were serious enough in his mind to make him conclude that he should leave Reynolds’s school after two years. He wrote “earnest letters” to his mother and persuaded her to arrange a move to his fifth school, Bury School (founded in 1550) in Bury St Edmunds, early in 1617. He there relished “a very able teacher, a wholesome aire,” and a happy nearness to his siblings and his “deare & religious mother” at Stow Hall. Unfortunately, his mother was increasingly ill and so saddened that he found her “strangelie altered in her verie countenance & carriage.” He came to think of his time with John Dickenson, the “vpper Master” of the school, as being among the happiest of his life. Although there only eighteen months, Simonds concluded that he “profited moore in this shorte space vnder his milde and louing government” than in all his earlier schooling. He concluded that he had come to “loue & prize learning” in a way that he had never before experienced.45 A paper that he wrote headed “a breife meaning of Gods Law” may have been intended for his mother at this time. It begins with the stricture that “thou shalt permit none to reside with thee in the family” who differs “in his judgment, from the vndoubted truth of Gods eternall word, or in his manners to d[is]sent from the true practise of his divine Law.” The same applied to anyone who took pleasure in “ignorance of God,” who did not try “to walk in the wayes of godlinesse,” or who was “giuen to idolatry, superstition, or false worship, and regardeth not in every part of life and

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conversation to embrace Gods holy will.” Examples of the latter included profanation of “his holy sabboth” and pursuing “vaine pastimes” such as theater going.46 He also copied a passage of anti-Jesuit doggerel into one of his school exercise books from this period.47 Simonds believed that he had gained much from Dickenson’s tutelage. His Greek had improved a little, but his Latin was such that he “scarce mett with any latine author prose or verse” that he “could not interpret at first sight.” The attainment of learning became so pleasurable that he occasionally neglected food and sleep; only rarely did Dickenson “rebuke mee for neglect of my booke, but often for my sitting vpp too late at it.” Indeed, when a certain Mr. Hubbard, M.A., came from Cambridge to examine students at his school orally in Latin, Simonds not only spoke up but also caught the visitor out “twice or thrice . . . in false Latine.” This “soe nettled” poor Hubbard that he soon fled. This would not be the last time that Simonds displayed a readiness to confront clergymen who did not come up to his standards of learning, zeal, and theological judgment. Meanwhile, his frequent resort to his mother’s company, “partaking of her zealous praiers, godlie instructions & blessed example” heightened his “loue & exercise of the best things.” He realized that he had begun “to performe holy duties feelinglie & with comforte” that he had previously performed merely “out of custome.” He also continued his “former course of noting & writing of sermons.” After he got to Cambridge, he discovered that by his note-taking he had “gott more knowledg in the fundamentall points of Religion then many Bachelors of Art had attained vnto in the Vniversities.”48 He could not have foreseen that his note-taking skills would enable him to create the parliamentary journal that is the basis of his modern fame.

St. John’s College, Cambridge Despite the “sweet and happie life” he enjoyed at Bury School, Simonds began to yearn to follow several of his friends who had gone up to Cambridge. Indeed, he decided that “no earthly happines” could be imagined beyond than that of studying at the university. On May 20, 1618, he traveled with his father to Cambridge, where they were welcomed by Richard Holdsworth, the theologian who would be his tutor. Simonds took pride in the fact that Holdsworth, a fellow of St. John’s College, was “one of the most eminent schollars in the vniversitie” and “inferior to few in the kingdome for depth of learning & assiduitie of studie.” After six weeks of further preparation back in Bury, he returned to Cambridge to settle in at St. John’s.49 He became devoted to Holdsworth, a thoroughgoing Calvinist. He described him in a letter to his father as “my Tutor the

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mirror of preachers” and remained in contact with him long after leaving Cambridge.50 Among other posts he held in Cambridge, Holdsworth was one of the university preachers, and Simonds noted that his sermons at the university church were “by general approbation deemed extraordinary.” When Holdsworth preached at St. George, Stowlangtoft, he spoke “so sweetly and profitably” that Simonds “began to love him even better than ever.”51 Holdsworth also held a rectory in London and became an eminent preacher there as well. During his first weeks at St. John’s, Simonds took pleasure in making new acquaintances, visiting other colleges, taking walks, and using the bowling ground and the tennis court in his college. Then a terrible blow fell. During the second week of July, his mother, then in her thirty-eighth year, became desperately ill. He was sent for in the middle of the night to return to Stow Hall so that she could see him before she died. He met his father and a cousin in the courtyard “with ther eyes standing full of teares.” A few minutes later, he saw his mother and found that she was “soe changed & altered with her sicknes as that I scarcelie knew her.”52 His description of her condition was detailed and graphic, so much so that Halliwell omitted it completely from his edition of the autobiography. According to Simonds: the stopping of her vrine was doubtles by the stone in the kidnies, because shee had noe such extreame paine & torment as is vsuallie incident to those whoe die of the stone in the bladder. But as shee was eased one way soe it is probable her death by that meanes was spunn out into that long & soare sicknes of seuenteene dayes; in which shee slept but vnquietlie & was forced to vomitt vpp most of the sustenance shee tooke, taking alsoe many vnpleasant & loathsome potions . . . some few daies before her death, her vrine hauing been long mingled with & in each part corrupted & tainted her bloud shee was made euen heart sicke often by it.53

In the few days between his return from Cambridge and her death, Simonds “assisted at her pallatside kneeling weeping & and praying with others,” and he took comfort from the fact that although she said little, “shee had her perfect vnderstanding” not only during her illness “but alsoe to the last minute in the verie howre of death.” When the attending clergyman, Richard Chamberlain, prayed that God would accept her soul into heaven, she raised her right hand and said “Yea amen good God.” Around midday on July 31, she “sunke away with as little noise or striuing, . . . as if shee had taken a meere slumber: & soe changed a troublesome and an vncertaine life for an eternall and an unintermixed happines.”54 There was no doubt that she knew she was dying; at one point when a former maid-servant sought to comfort her with hopes of recovery, Sissilia told her she erred, “for thou seest mee heare; that am

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flesh too day & earth too morrow.”55 Simonds inserted a lengthy eulogy of her in his autobiography, and he described her funeral on August 6 as performed “with a verie good solemnitie.” It was well attended by the local gentry who had been invited and by “a multitude of others that came voluntarilie.” In the funeral sermon, Chamberlain “made soe liuelie & full a description of her many eminent guifts & graces, as I doubt not but the memorie thereof remained in diuers of his hearers for ther practice and imitation.”56 Simonds recalled his mother’s death as “the heauiest & soarest affliction” he had yet experienced.”57 He suffered not only in emotional but in immediate practical terms. She had always been a careful manager of the household and cleverly saved enough from her allowance for its expenses to provide for his clothing and other needs when he was away at school. She was adept enough at this to hide some expenditures from her penurious husband. For example, at one point she wrote to say that she understood from Simonds’s previous letter about his “wants the which god willing shall be supplied.” As for “the gowne. If you can make that [last], til chrismas you shall haue one made here at your coming; and also a new winter suite, and a cloke.” She told him that he would not “lacke” so long as he was “dutifall” to his tutor and “painfull [painstaking] in your studyes. . . . I haue sent here inclosed a halfe croun in gould to your selfe.”58 Simonds quickly realized how different his life would be when a perfectly reasonable bill for his room and board arrived soon after the funeral from his tutor at Cambridge. His father was so angry at it that he feared that his career at Cambridge was finished. Fortunately, Paul calmed down enough to give Simonds the money to pay the bill, and so the young man returned to St. Johns “cladd in my mourning apparell, the true index of my sadd heart.”59 It was the first of many times that they would clash over the adequacy of Simonds’s stipend. That summer, Paul insisted that £50 per year should be adequate, whereas Simonds said that he hoped for £60 at “the uttermost,” knowing that occasional unexpected expenses would trigger angry arguments “vpon euerie reckoning.” He wrote that his inadequate allowance caused him “much want & discontent” not only during the rest of his time at Cambridge but during his legal studies in London as well. Looking back, over a decade and a half later, he concluded that “the want of outwarde comfortes” in his youth encouraged him “moore to prize & seeke after” things that “weere of a diuine & excellent nature and moore permanent.” He conceded that at that time he had not yet “dived into the causes nature and effects of a true and livelie faith, yet I dailie encreased in knowledge of the best things & in the constant and growing practice of a godlie life.”60 As we shall see, a central

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feature of his spiritual journey would be the way in which he repeatedly reported progress, only to become hypercritical about what had gone before as soon as he had reached some new and previously unseen summit. Soon after Simonds’s return to St. John’s, he began what he called his “common place booke of Diuinitie.” His first entry came from a sermon he heard in St. Mary’s, the university church, in which the preacher criticized those students who “filled great volumes with collections touching humane Artes & Sciences, but seldome with Diuinitie.” At no point is there any indication that Simonds was considering a clerical career, but his abiding interest in religious matters led him to attend theological discussions that regularly occurred in the chapel of his college. He also regularly sat in on “diuinity actes,” disputations, and lectures on theological issues that were open to all members of the university.61 He heard George Herbert lecture on rhetoric and dined with him after his appointment as Public Orator in 1620.62 Among others, he also heard lectures such as those given by Dr. John Davenant, the Lady Margaret professor of divinity, master of Queen’s College and later bishop of Salisbury.63 Davenant, a Calvinist episcopalian, bitterly criticized the rising faction of anti-Calvinist theologians, and Simonds admiringly described Davenant as a man who had “most clearelie confuted the blasphemies of Arminius, Bertius & the rest of that rabble of Jesuited Anabaptists.”64 Whether he had quite such a firm grasp of soteriological controversies as this statement implies, at least during his time at Cambridge, may be doubted, but his knowledge improved steadily. It is important to notice that Simonds’s method was to equate all theological writers who rejected Calvinistic predestinarian doctrine in favor of a role for free will in human salvation. Anyone guilty of this fundamental error, he insisted, was a damnable heretic, regardless of preferences concerning forms of church government or worship. Anabaptists at one extreme and Jesuits and “papists” at the other might seem no more capable of mixing than oil and water, but to Simonds they were all equally repugnant descendants of the early-fifth-century arch-heretic, Pelagius the free-willer. As we shall see, Simonds arrived at this position early in the 1620s, and for the rest of his life it remained his explanation for the operations of divine providence throughout history and in his own time. Early in his Cambridge interlude, Simonds enjoyed the company of others and was, as he wrote, “disposed to refuse no overtures.” Indeed, his tutor Holdsworth felt he overdid it a bit and administered what the young man described as “a most loving caution.” The young man then decided that “the fashion of visiting and being visited overmuch” should be avoided. He sought out the company of those senior fellows of his col-

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lege who behaved in an “honest and scholar-like” manner while shunning “the idle and ridiculous” talkers. Predictably enough, the latter sort derided their priggish critics, and when two of them resigned, Simonds felt that St. John’s was “much beatified” by their absence.65 Moreover, he professed astonishment at the prevalence of “common nicknaming & scoffing at Religion & the power of godlines (a strange abuse in an Vniuersitie of a Reformed Church).” But he continued his effort to sustain his “practice of an honest life.” With the help of his “louing tutor & other learned and godlie men of his acquaintance,” he became “more resolute in the waies of pietie” and more careful to absent himself from “the vnnecessarie societie of all debauched & atheisticall companions (which then swarmed there).” He attended lectures on Greek and rhetoric and read, under his tutor’s direction, more books of logic, ethics, physics, and history. He wrote letters to friends and to his father in Latin and English and worked to “amend & perfect” his style in both languages. His father’s letters in particular he found especially helpful because of their “verie sententious and loftie” English.66 On two occasions, he spoke publicly, once on the university’s stage as a “Bachelor commencer” during Lent in 1619 and soon afterward in the chapel at St. John’s. At the former, he “disputed extempore” against “two Sophisters” (i.e., second or third-year students). He felt he had done well against one but acknowledged that he was “plucked down” by the other. He was the “Respondent” in a disputation at St. John’s, and he prepared for it very thoroughly and carefully. Nevertheless, he managed to present only half of his argument before the moderator said that time was up. Since the respondent had to pay for the drinks afterward, Simonds succumbed to “a deep and dangerous melancholy” not only over the expense but also what he feared was a failure that damaged his standing among his fellow students.67 Readers of Simonds’s autobiography will recall his habit of inserting summaries of current events at home and abroad annually when he was at leisure during the Christmas season. These disquisitions often contained information he acquired later, and he did not intend them to be read as summaries of his knowledge at each distinct moment in time. One of these, the death of Prince Henry in 1612, has been explored above. Concerning the same year, he mentioned the death of Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, who, Simonds thought, had become the target of “the peoples hatred” because of the role he had played in the downfall of the man they had loved, Robert Devereux, earl of Essex. His trial and execution for treason in 1601 had been attributed to the “subtle head” of Salisbury. However, Simonds argued, “the times since” had shown that although Salisbury was “an ill christian in respect of his vnparaleld lust & hunt-

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ing after strange flesh,” he was nevertheless “a good statesman & noe ill member of the Commonwealth.” This was because, as lord treasurer of the realm, he paid “the ordinarie expences of the crowne, by the ordinarie revenues thereof . . . without pressing & depauperating the subject, with new imposicions and vnlimited taxes.”68 Here Simonds had in mind the forced loan of 1626 and other Caroline expedients such as the ship money writs of the mid-1630s. Simonds’s ruminations on the year 1617 afford another example. In the autobiography, he called it a year that “prooued fatall to the Christian worlde at least to the Reformed churches professing the true religion.” This was because “the seedes of all those bloudie tragedies which have since filled France & Germanie . . . were at this time sowen.” In France, Catholic nobles who had earlier resisted Louis XIII’s tyranny with force yielded to him, thereby enabling him to oppress “his best subjects the Protestants,” who had helped his father to the throne. In Germany, the hundred-year anniversary of Luther’s initial “publike profession of the Gospell” was lauded by “the Evangelical States and Princes.” But—catastrophically in his view—“some Jesuiticall & divelish instruments” were encouraging the “Pseudo-Lutherans” with their “Anabaptistical” tenets who would eventually split the Protestant movement. Some of these “Pseudo-Lutherans” would later ally with the papists, while “the Princes of the Heluetian Confession . . . who follow Luther in all his truths; & onlie leaue him in his mistakes” would find themselves on the defensive against the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II and his armies after the Thirty Years’ War commenced in 1618. Simonds went on to mention the rise in the Low Countries of “the hereticall faction of the Anabaptists vnder the new & false name of Arminianism, [who] beganne openlie to defend their Pelagian blasphemies.” By 1638, “like ill weedes,” these heresies had “growen to such a ranknes, as they haue almost outgrowne the truth it selfe.” James I, to his credit, had earlier advised the Dutch to suppress the Arminian heresy on the grounds that it would cause “the ruine of ther State.” James had even denounced Arminius himself as “the enemie of God.”69 The autobiography was written between 1636 and 1638, and it was a political memoir containing numerous retrospective judgments in the style of Jacques Auguste de Thou’s History of His Own Time.70 In fact, there is no evidence that in 1617 Simonds knew about Arminius, although he described the Synod of Dort in the retrospective autobiography. The earliest mentions of Arminianism in D’Ewes’s papers other than in the Autobiography are a pair of comments in a diary he kept from 1622 to 1624 in London. In the entry for February 13, 1623, he noted the existence of an “arminian sect” in Holland. And on February 22, 1624, he wrote that

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“wee had one verie bad sermon savouring of Arminianisme, a verie dangerous heresie, being but revived pelagianisme, or rather revised, which was first broached in the low Cuntries and had now of late spread exceedinglie in Cambridge and in most partes of England.”71 It is indeed likely that he began to be aware of the problem at Cambridge, but it cannot be precisely determined when he began to pay close attention to it. He would become increasingly obsessed with it during the mid-1620s and thereafter. Late in November 1618, Simonds stood in Holdsworth’s chamber quite early, and while praying, they happened to be looking to the east when they caught sight of “a verie coruscant & vnusuall starre.” Holdsworth, amazed, thought that it was a comet, and his notion was confirmed when its length greatly extended “in the manner of a foxes taile, as it gaue all men a sadd occasion of seuerall dismall coniectures.” They soon learned that it had been spotted on the sixteenth of November in Germany, and it continued to be visible until the middle of December. Another comet seen much farther east in November looked like “a crooked sworde” or scimitar worn by Turks and Persians, and, sure enough, “great warrs & slaughters did afterwards ensue betweene those two Mahumetan nations.” Thinking of the recently begun Thirty Years’ War, Simonds wondered whether the new comet he and Holdsworth had seen presaged “the sadd & still continuing desolations of Germanie & other partes of the Christian world.” In addition, “this portentous starre” had just disappeared from view when Simonds himself came nearer to death than ever before. He believed that he did not dare “presume to thinke that the diuine hande called mee to soe earlie a sight of it to forewarne mee of my near approaching danger,” but he nevertheless suspected that it had indeed been a warning that he had not heeded.72 The practice at St. John’s was to ring a small bell that was located near the main college gate at six o’clock every morning. On December 21, he found himself awake when the ringing began and, though it was still quite dark, he rushed to help ring the bell. Taking hold of the bell rope, he pulled it vigorously and then happened to step on the end of the rope. It somehow caught him and pulled him up so sharply that he was turned upside down and raised into the air. He fell on his “bare head, the crowne of it being the first parte that pitched vpon the stones.” When he returned to consciousness, the pain in his head was “soe extreame and terrible” that he was certain that his “skull had been broaken & crushed all too peices.”73 Simonds was helped to his room and put to bed while help was summoned. He drifted in and out of consciousness for many hours and suffered numerous “dreadfull & ghastlie fitts of convulsions . . . the bloud alsoe continuallie issuing out of mine eares.” A surgeon came and de-

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termined that the convulsions were “the verie pangs of death it selfe.” Holdsworth sent a message to Paul D’Ewes in London, saying he should hurry to Cambridge because Simonds’s death seemed imminent. Deeply saddened, Paul set out, “bringing monie with him to defray my funerall charges, as hee hath since tolde mee.” Before he arrived, two surgeons discovered the depression in the patient’s skull and assumed that it had been caused by the accident in the bell tower. They bathed and shaved the side of his head and bound his arms in order to keep him still during the surgical operation they believed was necessary. Then, in the nick of time, “the boundles prouidence & admirable goodnes of my mercifull God . . . now wrought a wonder, I am sure; if not a miracle, for my deliuerie.” Mr. Chambers, a fellow of St. John’s, had the evening before noticed the “depression” in the young man’s skull, and Simonds had told him that it came from a childhood injury suffered in Dorchester. Chambers thereby supplied the information that led the surgeons to back away from their “terrible dissection,” and during the night Simonds’s pain lessened. By the next morning, he had recovered sufficiently “to discourse sensiblie & rationallie.” By the time his father and eldest sister arrived the next day, the danger was past.74 Although Simonds never again suffered such a dramatic and life-threatening accident or illness, the next year, 1619, was not easy. Struck down by what he described as a severe and lasting attack of malaria, he returned to Suffolk for most of April and May before regaining his health and returning to his studies at Cambridge in time to attend commencement at the beginning of July. Thanks to the good offices of Abraham Gibson, the pastor of Kediton and his “old acquaintance & kind freind,” he returned to Suffolk to spend the Christmas holiday at Kediton Hall, the seat of Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston. He had visited Sir Nathaniel briefly the previous summer as well, and on both occasions he had seen Anne Clopton, whom he would marry in 1626. One of Sir Nathaniel’s cousins, in 1619 she was nearly seven years old, and Simonds wrote that at that time “I neuer imagined that of all women liuing God had ordained her for my wife or that I should haue remained soe long vnmarried as I afterwardes did.” As it happened, he did not set eyes on her again until he became her suitor in 1626. Her mother had died in 1615, and when Simonds had first seen her in the summer of 1619, she was dressed in mourning clothes following the death of her father, Sir William Clopton.75 Her upbringing became the responsibility of Dame Ann Barnardiston, her grandmother and a formidable dowager whose negotiations with Paul and Simonds D’Ewes will be considered below. Simonds D’Ewes is best known to historians for his journal of the Long

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Parliament, and it is thus worth noting that he recorded the date on which he initiated the practice of writing down “each particular daies passages” of his life “which weere most memorable.” He began to do this on February 27, 1620. His autobiography consists of a condensation (with extensive elaborations and digressions) of what must have been a substantial number of diaries that he wrote in “a strange & new-inuented character” that only he could decipher.76 The year 1619 was also when he began to place at or near the end of his account of each year a summary and analysis of the preceding year’s notable events in the public arena. So, for example, at this point he inserted his summary for 1619 (following the contemporary English practice of beginning the new year on March 25). It is shorter than most of its successors but adumbrates many themes that would recur with great regularity. He stated that James I’s queen, Anne of Denmark, had died on November 17, 1619, and the timing of her death thus spared her “the sadd desolations which this yeare & the next ensuing wasted Germanie, & therein the Palatinate the ancient inheritance” of her son-in-law, the Prince Elector Frederick V. He gave a brief account of the abortive attempt of the Bohemians to replace Ferdinand of Austria as their ruler with Frederick V, who was the great hope of “the Protestant partie in Germany.” He mentioned that young Frederick and the Bohemians had hoped for help from England that was not forthcoming.77 Although he here resisted the temptation to lament the sad consequences of this failure and denounce those he believed responsible for it, he certainly would do so later in his book. Simonds passed another spiritual milestone while attending the bachelors’ commencement in Cambridge on Wednesday, March 1, 1620. Of the opening “act” of this event, Simonds offered a terse description: “The proctors oratorized: the tripos jested: the Bachelors replied: and four Masters of Arts disputed.”78 On this day, what he heard convinced him of “the holines of Gods day being our christian Sabbaoth and it was the maine groundworke vpon which I built the practice of all other pious duties.” On the following Sunday, he began to act on his new conviction by attending three sermons. The first he heard in his college’s chapel, the second in St. Mary’s “in the forenoon,” and the third in the afternoon at another church in Cambridge where a good friend, John Jefferay, was preaching. Jefferay, thirteen years older than Simonds, was a fellow of Pembroke Hall who was chosen by the town of Cambridge as its lecturer. Simonds wrote that Nicholas Felton, the bishop of Ely and a man “eminent both for learning & pietie,” had approved Jefferay’s selection by the town. It was one of the first of a number of occasions on which he would stress that the Church of England possessed some godly bishops. He declared all three

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sermons “orthodox & vsefull,” and in the evening, he occupied himself “in enlarging & correcting such notes as I had taken at the afternoone sermon.”79 Until the end of his life, Simonds continued the habit of note-taking at sermons, and he soon came to regard the Lord’s Day as poorly observed unless he heard two sermons (and three when he could get them, as he often did when he was in London or Cambridge). His notes were often scrawled on the versos of letters or drafts of letters or other documents. He kept no systematic record of them. Readers of his papers stumble across them repeatedly, only rarely finding an indication of where or when the sermon was preached or who preached it. In his vast correspondence his approach was quite different, for there he was methodical about recording dates and places. He routinely indicated both Julian and Gregorian dates in letters to his Dutch friends and others who used the Gregorian calendar, and he nearly always indicated the location from which he wrote. He often began letters noting precisely when he received the letter to which he was replying, and he took care with dates when relating news of contemporary events that he had obtained. At first sight, the absence of details about sermon notes seems unlike him. Sermon note-taking had, however, become for him a liturgical as well as an intellectual act. The dates he heard the sermons and the preachers who gave them were less important than the insights into the meaning of the Scriptures that he gathered and added to his ever-expanding stock of biblical knowledge. He internalized them to the extent that they lost any temporal significance in his mind. The precision with which he took note of dates for “worldly” events such as the activities of emperors, princes, popes, generals, and armies disappeared when he considered the eternal truths conveyed by reading and hearing the word of God. For him, the latter informed the interpretation of the former but needed no dating in terms of human calendars. There can be no doubt about the enormous importance of sermons in Simonds’s piety, yet they were a part of a larger whole. He read not only the Bible but also numerous books such as Bishop Lewis Bayly’s highly popular Practice of Pietie and Bishop John Jewel’s Apology of the Church of England. He considered visiting the sick an appropriate activity on Sundays and avoided participating in sports on that day. He enjoyed sports— including bowling on the college green, tennis, running, and angling—on other days. He even injured his shin playing “some hot foot-ball” with fellow Johnians against a group from Trinity College. Simonds spent Saturday afternoons and evenings in study and prayer before those Sundays on which he expected to be a communicant at the Lord’s Supper. This was his means of preparing for what he described as “that blessed and

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sacred banquet.” Another approved work was the giving of alms, and he described one sermon he had heard at St. Benet’s in Cambridge as offering powerful arguments that “the poor serve as carriers to transport the treasures of pious rich men to heaven, where they will find them when they arrive there themselves.” Indeed, of that sermon Simonds opined that even had the most covetous man in the world heard it, “it would have melted him to a sudden liberality.” Perhaps it was still in his mind when one Sunday after dinner in the spring of 1620, he encountered a man who looked “needful,” gave him money, and heard his mournful tale of capture by pirates who seized the mariners’ goods and money and put them in a small boat on “the merciless seas” off the Spanish coast.80 He enjoyed talking about religious matters with his godly friends, and at Cambridge his most frequent partner in such discussions was Jefferay. As he later put it in his autobiography, Simonds delighted in their friendship while “in Cambridge, and long after, and much good I reaped from him in my seuerall visits of him before my departure thence.”81 For example, while still at St. John’s, he asked Jefferay questions about such things as the whereabouts of the souls of Jesus Christ and Lazarus while their bodies were entombed, the efficacy of baptizing infants, and the Virgin Mary’s intention when she married Joseph. Of baptism, Jefferay told him that it was not the “sole and efficient cause of salvation,” as the papists claimed, but rather it is “but the means” to that end. At one point the two men “fell to talking” about the experience of those in heaven. They concluded that everyone in heaven would speak in Hebrew. During this discussion, Simonds described himself as “almost rapt with joy.” At one point, Jefferay advised his young friend, so thirsty for theological understanding, to consider entering the clerical profession.82 If Simonds was ever so inclined, he did not mention it. He knew with great certainty that his father expected him to become a lawyer, and he was ever the dutiful son, even when quite angry with his father.

The Summons to the Middle Temple As the spring of 1620 proceeded, Simonds busied himself in a wide range of studies. He frequently listened to the eminent Andrew Downes lecture on Demosthenes. Downes had been professor of Greek at Cambridge for more than thirty years. Simonds believed that Downes was considered “the ablest Graecian of Christendome” according to no less an authority than “Joseph Scaliger himself.” Much taken with Downes’s learning, he went to his house and found the scholar “sitting in a chaire with his leggs vpon a table . . . . Hee neither stirred his hatt nor bodie but onlie tooke mee by the hande, and instantlie fell into discourse . . . touch-

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Fig. 1.1. Detail from the D’Ewes wall monument showing Simonds and his two brothers. Jan Janson could have met Simonds, since he was in London in 1624 at the Middle Temple. Simonds might have accompanied his father to discuss the contract with Janson, but it is impossible to be certain about this point and therefore we cannot know if the likeness is accurate. Photo by J. Sears McGee.

“A rationall hearer”—1602–1620  

ing matters of learning & criticisms.” During April, Simonds worked “very laboriously” on the physics, ethics, and politics of Aristotle, translated some of Horace’s odes into English, took notes from Florus’ Roman history and read Bodin’s “elaborate worke entituled Methodus Historia.” For relaxation at night, he read such works in English as Stephens on Herodotus and Spenser’s Faerie Queen.83 This approach must have owed much to his innovative tutor Holdsworth’s “gentler course” of study for gentlemen, a course that mixed demanding readings of such fundamental scholarly subjects as logic and philosophy in the morning with “a more relaxed afternoon” spent on poetry, history, and classical oratory.84 Somewhat paradoxically in Simonds’s case, the result was that he began “to consider of imploying my labours for the publike good not doubting if God sent mee life but to leaue somewhat to posteritie.” What this would have led to had he remained at Cambridge longer is uncertain, but in the short run it did not matter because his father sent him a letter on May 13 ordering him to prepare to leave his “Academicall studies” at Cambridge in order to study the common law at the Middle Temple in London.85 This peremptory instruction did not come as quite the thunderbolt to this bookish young man as one might think. Simonds claimed that it did not bother him as much as it might have earlier. “I partlie expected it,” he wrote, “& had partlie framed my minde to a willing & cheerefull obedience.” His father was, after all, a lawyer and legal bureaucrat who had taken care to assert Simonds’s claim to his grandfather’s chamber at the Middle Temple upon the latter’s death nine years earlier. By the time he wrote his autobiography seventeen years later, Simonds averred that even before leaving the university he had already become “wearie” of St. John’s because “swearing drinking rioting & hatred of all vertue & pietie under false & adulterate nicknames, did abound ther & generallie in all the vniuersitie.” Indeed, he asserted, “the verie sinne of lust begann to be knowen and practiced by verie boyes,” to the extent that he found himself forced “to liue almost a Recluses life” by limiting his conversation to “some of the honester fellowes” at St. John’s. To be sure, he took pleasure in the fact that at that time “noe Anabaptisticall or Pelagian heresies against Gods grace & prouidence” were afoot in Cambridge. Rather, “the Truth was in all publike sermons & Diuinitie acts asserted and maintained.” By the “truth,” he meant the Calvinist interpretation of the Church of England’s theology. Moreover, the liturgy remained unsullied, a point of the greatest importance for him. “None then dared to committ idolatrie by bowing to or towards or adoring the altar, the communion table or the bread & wine in the sacrament of the Lordes supper.” All of these enormities, he thought, had come along after his time at

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Cambridge. For a person of his tender conscience, however, the situation was disturbing even before the liturgical “enormities” commenced. Even when doctrine and worship were sound, “the power of godlines in respect of the practice of it” had been “in a most atheisticall & unchristian manner contemned & scoffed at.”86 Anyone who so much as attempted to live in a Christian manner was denounced with a scoffing nickname such as “puritan.” It was enough to make him put aside, for the time being, his dreams of writing for “the publike good” and acquiesce in his father’s demand that he turn to study of the law. During the period that the precise timing for his move to London remained uncertain, Simonds took advantage of the remaining months to enjoy his life as a university student. On May 15, 1620, he left Cambridge for a brief holiday in Suffolk. He heard his “kinde freind” Abraham Gibson preach in his turn at the weekly combination lecture at Bury St Edmunds on the market day. He saw his teacher there, Mr. Dickenson, before going on to Stow Hall and indulging in such recreations as “fishing bowling & visiting of seuerall freinds.” Back in Cambridge by May 18, he returned to his studies, but his ears were cocked for foreign news. He heard reports—which turned out to be false—of defeats of the Elector Frederick by the Emperor Ferdinand II. The reports, he decided, “weere either raised by some Romanists; or else they weere the sadd forerunners of those heauie desolations which ensued at the end of this summer.” Unfortunately, because James I was pursuing a marriage treaty for his son with the Spanish infanta, he decided to dispatch only a small army of three thousand volunteers under Sir Horace Vere to assist his sonin-law, the Elector Palatine. Even with some help from Transylvania and the Dutch Republic, the Palatine cause failed, and Simonds thought he knew why. It was because God had decided “to humble his true Church & deare children at this present” and force them to experience defeat “by the bloudy conquests & tyrannie of the Antichristian aduersarie.” This passage encapsulates the central feature of the world view Simonds held for the rest of his life. The true church was at war with the forces of Antichrist, and for the time being prayer seemed the only recourse. Simonds again attended the divinity acts on July 3 and kept up his studies as he awaited the expected summons from his father.87 Public events weighed ever more heavily on his mind. On June 10, Simonds wrote a letter to Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston filled with political information. The leading topic was the proposed marriage of Prince Charles to the Spanish infanta, a prospect that filled Puritans like D’Ewes and Barnardiston with horror. At this moment, Simonds simply wrote that “concerning the marriage few su[b]jects cann gesse the end, seing . . . [that] . . . princes have ther private

“A rationall hearer”—1602–1620  

ends besedes ther publicke negotiations.” Referring to the Bohemian conflict, he recalled Savonarola’s prophecy that “the church should shortly bee reformed by swords not words.” He also thought of what “a religious frier (not like those nowadayes)” told Martin Luther after “his discoverye of the Popes cousening indulgences.” What could not be achieved by political or military prowess would be won by “our zealous praiers, . . . even a happye issue to the true church of God.”88 The order from Paul D’Ewes to Simonds to depart from Cambridge finally arrived on August 14. On the next day, Simonds left Cambridge and, after dining at Kediton with Mr. Gibson, he reached Stow Hall and enjoyed a warm greeting from his father, two of his sisters, and his fiveyear-old brother Richard. During his eight-day visit at Stow, Paul talked to him about his future, which included a promise that Simonds would have his father’s entire estate given to him when he married. Although a dazzling prospect beckoned, Simonds worried about whether he would receive “a iust & due increase of maintenance” while pursuing his legal studies. He also feared that his father would remarry and have more children whose mother might use her wiles to enhance their prospects and diminish those of Sissilia’s children. It was a prospect that had troubled Sissilia herself at the end of her life. On August 24, he set out for Cambridge again, breaking his journey by spending the night at Kediton. Yet he found that his thoughts of marriage and financial freedom made it difficult to concentrate on his studies. He was saddened to realize that by leaving Cambridge, his “deare mother” from whose “full breasts” he had “sucked soe much varietie of learning,” he was losing not only his dear tutor Holdsworth, but many “louing freinds & . . . many lectures & exercises of the ablest witts” as well. On September 22, Holdsworth traveled with him to Stow Hall and particularly urged him not to forget “St. Thomas’s Day & the great deliuerance” God had granted him when he fell while ringing the college bell. His father once again made difficulties over paying the last bill, but finally “parted in freindlie sorte” with Holdsworth when he left four days later. During a few days at home before heading for London, Simonds “tasted such full experience of his [father’s] passion & cholericke nature” that he realized that living near his father in London might “produce noe good effects.” On Saturday October 7, 1620, he arrived at his father’s London base, his apartment in the Six Clerks’ Office in Chancery Lane. He soon found himself deeply beset by “soe manye new inconueniences & discontents” that his dissatisfactions in Cambridge “had been but shadowes vnto them.”89

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chapter

“The whole time & minde are filled with law”— 1620–1626

2

In 1638, Simonds D’Ewes composed in Latin a brief version of his autobiography in which he identified many of the high points of his life alongside some of his disappointments. Prominent among the former was the moment when in June 1623 he was called to the bar and thereby became a barrister. This advancement came two years and nine months after his departure from Cambridge. Like his father and maternal grandfather (and namesake), he studied the common law at the Middle Temple, one of the four Inns of Court. Simonds characterized his call to the bar as the moment when he “was elected to the class of those in togas,” the best Latin approximation he could think of for a very English ceremony.1 Sartorially, it meant that he put away his black gown without sleeves and put on a robe that featured long sleeves trimmed with velvet.2 It also meant that when he spoke at moots and similar events he could stand above the bar in the hall instead of below it and keep his hat on instead of having to argue bareheaded. In early modern England, the man who kept his headgear on held the higher rank, and the man who doffed his acknowledged inferior status. The ritual of the call was always performed in the great hall of the Middle Temple “at the cupboard.” The construction of the huge hall had been completed in 1574. The “cupboard” was a six-by-four-foot table built, according to tradition, out of timbers from the Golden Hind, the ship in which Sir Francis Drake had completed his famous circumnavigation of the earth in 1580. Drake himself dined in the hall on August 4, 1586, and was a member of the associated Inner Temple. He was a beneficiary of the practice of admitting influential men who were not lawyers but whose goodwill might pay dividends in one way or another.3 Simonds’s choice of the Latin word “toga” is not so far off the mark as might be thought. In classical Rome, the wearing of a toga signified Roman citizenship, something by no means available to every resident of the city. In early modern England as well as in ancient Rome, citizenship

“The whole time & minde are filled with law”—1620–1626

and residency were quite different things. Everyone was a subject of the English monarch, but no one was a citizen who had not successfully undergone a rigorous training program and passed a demanding test such as, for an artisan, creating a “masterpiece” in order to be acknowledged as a master craftsman in his guild. For students of the common law, being called to the bar was the counterpart. The Inns of Court were, like the trade and craft guilds, oligarchies. Architecturally, they resembled Oxford and Cambridge colleges, each having a hall, a chapel, and buildings arranged around courtyards that contained “chambers” where both senior and junior members lived and worked. For barristers practicing law, these served as offices and accommodations. Each Inn was governed by a group of senior common lawyers known as “masters of the bench” or “benchers,” and when benchers of the Middle Temple met to make decisions their gatherings were referred to as “parliaments.” Although many sons of peers and gentlemen studied at the Inns of Court, only 20 percent of those admitted as members of the four Inns became barristers during this period.4 Five strands of D’Ewes’s story will be considered in this chapter. Since preparation for his legal career dominated the period after he left Cambridge and before his marriage, we will begin with his experiences as a law student. He had no way of knowing that in 1626 he would marry an heiress whose wealth would enable him to abandon his plan to practice the law. Although he retained his interest in it and his commitment to its values and way of thinking, after his marriage he had the luxury of indulging the fascination with historical, antiquarian, and numismatic researches that he had undertaken while engaged in his legal studies. The second strand is D’Ewes’s early engagement with these archival materials, a pursuit that he would continue for the rest of his life. Third, although he began following domestic and foreign news avidly while quite young, the fact that he was in London for most of the 1620s meant that he enjoyed increased access to printed, handwritten, spoken, and whispered news and to the monarchs, aristocrats, courtiers, ambassadors, bishops, academicians, judges, lawyers, and gentlemen who made it. The autobiography that he completed in 1638 is in part a record of his unslakable thirst for news and of his habit of analyzing its consequences for his political, religious, and personal concerns. Fourth, during his Middle Temple years, he extended his spiritual regimen beyond the devotion to sermons and the sanctification of the Sabbath that we have observed from his school and university days. Finally, his private life, especially in terms of relations with his father and other members of his family, as well as his search for a bride, increased in complexity during these years in London. Yet the

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process of identifying and explicating these strands must not distract us from attention to their interwoven character in D’Ewes’s mind. Each had consequences for the others.

The Law Student When his legal studies began in October 1620, Simonds faced two significant obstacles to their completion. First, he was hampered by the lack of a private place to do his work. He had been admitted to his late grandfather’s chamber in the Middle Temple in 1611, thereby becoming more “ancient” (senior) than most of his fellow students. But his father had leased it to another man until November 22, 1621. Paul then refused to spend the money it would have taken to get Simonds another chamber to use in the interim, alleging that to do so might have created a hindrance to regaining the one to which he was entitled. For his part, Simonds took this as yet another example of his father’s penny-wise and pound-foolish nature. Many young men just down from Cambridge would have been delighted to be handed such a splendid excuse to enjoy the pleasures afforded by the teeming city before applying themselves to legal tomes. Simonds did not see it that way. It was the result, as he angrily wrote later, of his father’s “vnseasonable & preposterous” parsimony. The result was “the greatest losse & misspending of my pretious time that euer I was guiltie of before,” and it meant that his “deare studies” and even his “verie priuate deuotions” suffered. For a young man with such studious and pious habits, this was a bitter pill to swallow, worsened even more by his inadequate allowance. Forced to find diversions, he went sightseeing. He climbed to the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral on October 14, and two days later he toured the palace of Westminster and saw the “statelie new banqueting howse” that was under construction in Whitehall. He said nothing of its architecture, although Inigo Jones’s hall was the first building in the Renaissance neoclassical style to be built in London. Moreover, Simonds’s relative idleness led him to be, as he put it, “easilie drawen” into discussions of a marriage for himself. The talks led nowhere, but he took pleasure in gloating about how their considerable expense cost his father more than he could possibly have gained from the lease of another chamber.5 Meanwhile he languished in his father’s cramped quarters at the Six Clerks’ Office in Chancery Lane. a slow start The second obstacle to Simonds’s legal career was that, at the outset, he found the study of the common law uncongenial. To what extent this proceeded from a lingering resentment toward his father’s insistence on his

“The whole time & minde are filled with law”—1620–1626

departure from Cambridge is uncertain. But it is clear that while he was supposed to be studying law in the early months of 1621, he nevertheless spent much time writing Latin letters to his beloved Cambridge tutor, Richard Holdsworth, and his dear friend John Jefferay, a fellow of Pembroke College. He lengthily praised the Latinity of their letters to him, but said little about his legal reading. On January 18, for example, he wrote to Holdsworth praising the magnetic power of his tutor’s letters “illustrated everywhere with Demosthenic flourishes.” Lamenting his “lack of skill,” Simonds regretted that his own Latin proceeded “ignorantly and plainly without the nightingales” with which he would have liked to serenade his tutor and indeed degenerated into “a desperate coarseness” that could not “achieve the accurate things it wished for.”6 Jefferay would have none of this and praised Simonds’s learning fulsomely: “Your letter breathes elegance and erudition; it will be enough for mine if it breathes love.”7 Not until the vacation after Hilary term did Simonds so much as begin to discover that law could engage his mind. This discovery occurred not in London but at Busbridge (near Godalming) in Surrey at the home of his elder sister Jone and her husband, Sir William Ellyott. They married on February 7, 1621, and Paul, Simonds, and the other children took the first of what would be many vacations there just three weeks after the wedding.8 On Saturday, March 3, Simonds and his father arrived in the latter’s coach at Busbridge. Simonds admired Sir William’s “handsome timber howse” with its “large & well-stored fish ponds.” He delighted in the use of a private room there, and he managed to concentrate fully on his new subject. In three weeks at Busbridge, he had read much of a central text for common lawyers, Littleton’s Tenures. For the first time, he found that he “begann to take some delight in reading the law.” Indeed, he realized that he had learned more law during this vacation in the country than in the entire preceding five months in London. To be sure, “some” is not an adjective indicating great enthusiasm, and his continuing anger about his father’s tightfistedness may have darkened his memory of the preceding period.9 Nevertheless, it proved the beginning of a slow transition from coolness about law toward appreciation and eventually love of it. With his father, he returned to London on April 16 and happily accepted the offer of a gentleman of the Middle Temple to share his chamber. The interval in a shared space had its disadvantages. His friend and his friend’s visitors interrupted him at times, and it soon turned out that one reason for the offer was that the gentleman was hoping that his new chamber-mate would marry one of his kinswomen. Although keen to marry, Simonds put off his new friend because he was “in the treatie of another match.”

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During this period, he experienced at least a “reasonable entrance” into his “priuate studies” before the long awaited recovery of his own chamber on November 22, 1621.10 Just a month later, a catastrophic fire broke out in the Six Clerks’ Office that proved very costly to Paul D’Ewes and indeed to Simonds. Paul was in the country when it happened, and Simonds was called to the scene from the Middle Temple early on the morning of December 20. The letter that he wrote to his father while the fire still burned demonstrated his love, respect, and concern for his father, despite the tensions between them. It began, “Dear Father, I shall not need to giue counsell to your great wisedome, nor to direct where much experience hath gained the habite of an understanding harte yet doe both my zealous affection of obliged dutye mooue mee thus to write at this time.” An anguished and detailed description of the fire followed. We will return to the subject of the fire and its consequences below, but it should be noted here that for all of his frustrations with his father, Simonds tried hard to be a good son.11 Simonds’s shift toward devotion to the law began in Surrey in March 1621, but it proceeded erratically. On January 17, 1622, he and a fellow student, whom he characterized as both “religious and honest,” made a compact to study together and make themselves “good students.” On the next day he took up “Littleton againe and soe wee continued what wee had begun.”12 The cipher diary he kept during this period has frequent entries recording that he usually spent the morning at least reading law and sometimes worked at it throughout the rest of the day. For example, on the morning of May 9, he studied and, in the afternoon, went for a walk with “some good students of our howse . . . whoe discoursed of law.” Discomfited to find himself “soe perplexed” as to be unable to “remember what I had read,” he “began to despaire almost of studiing anye further.” He prayed, understanding that God was humbling him for having grown “somewhat confident.” He attended the moot that evening and “gott much good and benefit.” On the next morning, God visited him with “another mild correction” when he was reading a case from Part IV of Sir Edward Coke’s Reports. “I was soe terribly pusseled that I prostrated my self before my good God,” begging for improved “apprehension and judgment.” His prayer was answered when he made “some little better speed” that afternoon.13 In June, he returned early from Busbridge to the Middle Temple and studied until the summer term began. His progress was uneven and halting, but it continued despite his tendency to criticize himself angrily when he felt he had failed to make good use of his time. On September 3, 1622, for example, he went to a bookshop in Duck Lane where he bought the Reports of Sir James Dyer, “a booke I much wanted.”

“The whole time & minde are filled with law”—1620–1626

But on the following day he was disconsolate because “the progresse in my studye this day was very small.”14 Simonds found that he acquired much enlightenment from what he called the “publike exercises” of lectures delivered during the Lent and summer vacations by “readers,” who were senior lawyers selected for their expertise on particular topics. He also heard what he called “lesser readings in the afternoones” given in the Inns of Chancery. By “public” he meant open to members of the various Inns instead of limited to Middle Templers, and the “exercises” he attended also included moots held for the arguing of cases. Presiding over these was a bencher (often the term’s reader), and the participants consisted of two members of each of the four Inns of Court. One in each pair was a barrister and the other was a student working toward that rank. On the afternoon of Thursday, August 9, 1622, Simonds spoke eighth and last in one of these events held in the New Inn, his remarks being followed by the reader’s summation. Simonds was satisfied with his effort and received “good approbacion” from the listeners. It was “the first publike exercise of the Law I euer performed.” The first one was important, he later realized, because “this little successe encouraged mee much to a moore serious & constant studie” of the common law. Yet only a month later he admitted that the work was “soe difficult & vnpleasant” that he urgently needed to find another student to work through the same texts with him. Indeed, he accounted his entire first two years at the Middle Temple “amongst the vnhappiest dayes” of his life because of the time he had wasted “in idle discourses visitacions & issueles cares, which time I would since haue redeemed at a great rate.” Nevertheless, in November he started attending proceedings in the Court of Star Chamber and taking notes on the cases he heard there. He also had further successes in his second and third moots, on November 18 and December 12. The latter case he argued after supper in the Middle Temple Hall in law-French, that odd fusion of antiquated Norman French and English that common lawyers had to learn and then use. A professional jargon, it provided greater precision than English, the lawyers claimed, but the critics of lawyers denounced it as a conspiracy designed by the lawyers to make themselves necessary to their clients.15 The comment in Simonds’s cipher diary on this exercise may have been written immediately after he returned to his chamber: “This day I spente whollye about my moote and through Gods mercye performed at night soe well as I desired and gave him the glorye.”16 On February 15 he started to read Robert Keilway’s Reports, and it is clear that a sea-change had occurred from his troubles of the preceding autumn. In the cipher diary, we sense his surprise and pleasure that “though it were law, yet I read it with both delight

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“The whole time & minde are filled with law”—1620–1626

and profitt.”17 He later reflected that he had read Keilway “with moore satisfaction and delight then I had done formerlie anie other peice of our common Law.”18 There would be many more moots both before and after his call to the bar to prepare for and much more reading to do, but it is evident that he turned a corner early in 1623.19 the call to the bar On April 9, 1623, Simonds wrote a letter to his father, who was spending the holiday between law terms at Busbridge. He described his busy life at the Middle Temple as one of “daylie studies, dinner cases, supper discourses, evening mootes,” such that “the whole time & minde are filled with law.” Simonds had sought and received his father’s permission to stay in London in order to study, instead of spending the vacation in Surrey, but Paul expressed his worry that his son was being “moore mindfull of my bookes then my health.” The young man assured his father that he had recently listened to the anatomy lectures of the famous Dr. William Harvey, lectures that had made him “halfe an empiricke for others, & halfe a doctor for my selfe.” He made excuses for his slow progress, mentioning again his lack of a private chamber during his first year, and he asked that Paul not “hang waights on my leaden heeles, till I beginne to stand firme.” The “studie of the law admitts noe vacations though the practice doth.” Moreover, a novice in legal study “is like one that swimmes against a streame, [a] little slacknes carries him moore backeward in a minute then a long labour cann regaine.”20 Since he knew that the benchers issued their calls to the bar late in the term, this letter should be read as Simonds’s attempt to convince his father that if his name was not among those called this time, he should not be harshly judged. In his cipher diary, he had already noted that he was “somewhat troubled” during the previous term when it was rumored that he would be among those called by the benchers in February.21 Since that had not happened, it is no surprise that he was even more anxious in May and June. On May 20, he conceded that he was “somewhat troubled about a call to the barr” and joined several of his colleagues in a visit to the treasurer of the Middle Temple to ask for his help in the matter. They were received cordially, but when he took supper with a friend the next evening, he was so worried about “our call” that he could not “entertaine mirth.” He and his friends expected that the call would occur on Friday, May 23, but it did not. He was relieved when he learned, two days later, that no call had been issued.22 Then, on Friday, June 27, Simonds was informed that he was, along with fifteen “other gentlemen verie good students, called to the barre

“The whole time & minde are filled with law”—1620–1626

or made an vtter barrister by the benchers of our middle Temple.” He thereby joined those in “togas,” and the promotion gratified him, not least because his “dailie companions” called at the same time would, had he been denied, have advanced without him.23 That was the version of the event he put in his autobiography in 1637. In his contemporary cipher diary, however, his anxiety had a sharper edge. The rumor mill had been grinding loudly, and on June 24 one “inhumane bencher” said he should be worried, while two others offered encouragement. He knew that the call might be announced as early as June 25. He received nothing that day or the next, although he assured himself that God would do “that which was best for mee.” He again supped with a friend on June 27, but was “sadd and even in despaire of it.” Then, after supper, the good news came, giving “much comfort” to his “drooping spiritt.” It would, he conceded, have been “a great disgrace to mee had I missed it.”24 The potency of the desire to avoid embarrassment should never be underestimated. The very next morning he went to his father with his good news. Paul was “much ioyed” and “added fortye pounds a yeare to my maintenance.” This meant that Simonds began to receive ₤100 a year, paid quarterly, and at last he was free of the “short stipend” that he had “groaned vnder” first in Cambridge and then in London.25 He therefore considered June 27, 1623, “the first day of my outward happines since” his mother’s death in 1618. The new income enabled him to begin collecting the library of manuscripts and printed books that he would augment for the rest of his life, always “spending upon bookes what I could spare from my moore vrgent & necessarie expenses.” This promotion also meant that he would no longer have to speak at moots bareheaded. At last he could keep his hat on, a point he made very quickly. After supper on July 10, he spoke for the first time in his new rank at a moot in the Middle Temple Hall, “two gentleman vnder the barre arguing it first in law french bareheaded as I did myselfe before I was called to the bar at the cupboard.” Heartened and at last enthusiastic about legal study, Simonds devoted the long vacation to it and “gained euerie day moore knowledg & found more content in my time studiouslie spent then in idlenes.”26 With the beginning of the Michaelmas term in 1623 came new responsibilities for Simonds and a colleague from his cohort of new barristers. They had to choose the topics for debate in four moots and spent much of September on that task while continuing to perform in moots and similar exercises during the term. He was so busy that his father again feared for his health, writing on September 8 to say that he had heard of a man “so hott of law the first yeer, that his affections not only tooke cold, but even chilled in the next. In love and learning a cold is dangerous.” Paul praised

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his son’s “desire to doe well,” but also urged him to adjust his study to his strength, “lest yow should betray yowr life into the mercyles hand of a Consumption. Yt is thought that necessity cannot make yow drive so furiously, and breaknecke Ambition should not.” Ten days later, Simonds thanked his father for his solicitude, but said of the “hott lover” who soon cooled that he had known “a hott wooer that chilled not the first yeare, nor could the next, nor cared ever after; ever may a student have the like fortune, because it hath a better ground [and] a surer footing.”27 The Christmas holiday was celebrated in Tunbridge Wells, to which they traveled “some 26 long kentish miles” from London “and for the most parte dirtie.” While enjoying the time with his family, Simonds also worked hard: “I neuer spent the time either soe laboriouslie or profitablie in the studie of the common law before or since, as I did this Chrismas during my stay at Tunbridge.” In the spring of 1624, besides his other duties, he began to attend the morning sessions of the Court of Common Pleas and “report” on what he heard, meaning to take the kinds of notes he had long been taking elsewhere (including at sermons). He debated law-cases at various Inns of Chancery (such as Staple’s Inn, Clifford’s Inn, and New Inn), the “lesser” Inns that prepared many students for entry to an Inn of Court.28 He maintained this routine, and his confidence in his abilities continued to grow. He worked closely with benchers, some of whom he came to despise. For example, Rowley Ward, who began his reading on August 2, 1624, Simonds considered “a dull & easie Lawer,” and he “gaue little satisfaction to his auditors all the time of his Reading.”29 Others he admired. His first exchange with Robert Bartlett, at a moot in the Middle Temple Hall in July 1626, ended with “hott words at the cupboard” between them. Bartlett’s “squabling” with Simonds so disheartened the other utter-barristers that at supper a week later they backed out of a moot with Bartlett planned for that evening. Simonds arrived halfway through the meal, and Bartlett asked him to step in even though he, unlike the others, was unprepared. Many of them, Simonds noted, had studied the law far longer than he had. Nevertheless he rose to the challenge so well that when it was over, Bartlett stated that his arguments were so effective that anyone would have thought he had had ample time to study the legal points involved. They became fast friends and so remained after Bartlett was appointed a justice of the Court of King’s Bench.30 It is indisputable that by 1625 (if not sooner), Simonds’s legal education had led him to identify thoroughly with the ethos of the common law. He expressed anger when James I appointed John Williams, bishop of Lincoln, to the important office of Lord Keeper in 1621. In Simonds’s view, no

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shortage of “able wise lawers” who were “verie honest & religious men” existed at the time, men much less guilty of the “fawning & flatterie” at which certain clergymen excelled.31 Williams had served as chaplain to another lawyer and former chancellor, Lord Ellesmere, and Simonds would later recall that Ellesmere had predicted that Williams “would proue another Wolsey, which was strangelie verified many yeares after by his fall, as now by his rising.”32 When in November 1625, the new king, Charles I, dismissed Williams, Simonds exulted. “That office,” he wrote, “was most proper to a common lawer; and most vnfit for a clergiman, who should not ambitiouslie seeke to imbarke himselfe into Lay-imploiments & offices.”33 Simonds’s hostility to clerics like Williams would reassert itself against Laud and others later, and one of its sources was his immersion in the common law. In early August 1626, Simonds made what proved to be his final appearances as a barrister in debates over points of law, one at the New Inn and the other at the Middle Temple. Although he never took the legal knowledge he had painstakingly acquired into a courtroom, he remained proud that he had become sufficiently adept to prepare in a day or so to speak at moots (as he would have done in court had he practiced) on matters of great complexity. When he wrote his autobiography, he recalled two occasions on which he had “argued our middle Temple Readers case at the cupboard.” This was a task ordinarily “performed by such as haue studied the law at least 20. yeares.” He remembered other times when he had spoken and surprised himself by how quickly he could make his preparation and do it “soe fullie & solidlie, & cite soe manye Law-authorities or Bookecases in euerie one as I did.”34 “I cannot denie,” he summed up, “but the studie of our Common Lawe which most men account to be a verie hard & difficult worke grew most delightfull & pleasing vnto mee especiallie after I was once called to the barre.”35 Simonds never practiced, because by midsummer 1626, the arrangements for his marriage to Anne Clopton were complete. His wealth combined with hers freed him to use the time, skills, and energy he had in abundance for other purposes.

The Historian Besides the financial liberation afforded by his marriage, when he looked back from 1638 Simonds D’Ewes specified religion as another reason for his decision not to practice law. Although he felt well prepared for a legal career and indeed for the highest offices in the country that were open to a lawyer, he foresaw a great storm for “the Church of God & his gospell” that he believed was “almost euerie wheere ruined abroad” and in danger even in England. He thought of Jeremiah’s words to Baruch

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that “these weere not times for Gods children to seeke great things in.” That did not mean, he quickly added, that he intended to indulge himself in “a lazie & vnprofitable course of life.” Rather, he would persist in his “deare & invaluable studies” and write books that would have lasting value for his countrymen.36 As a schoolboy, he had put considerable effort into writing poetry, and in 1617 he had counted up the “verses” he had composed in Latin and Greek and found them to number 2,850.37 Proud of his poetizing, he inserted into his autobiography sixteen Latin odes (and one in Greek) that he wrote before going up to Cambridge. He admitted that he would not have included them had not he noticed “Thuanus doth frequentlie insert into the bookes of his life the verses hee made.” Also, he put them in because the “seuerer studies which followed gaue mee seldome occasion to play the Poet afterwards.”38 By “seuerer studies” he meant, primarily, his historical and antiquarian projects. As early as March 1620 in Cambridge, he had a notion of applying himself to “the publike good” and thereby “leaue somewhat to posteritie” if God granted him a long life. He drafted what he called “diuers imperfect essayes” on such second-century Roman writers as Aulus Gellius, whose twenty-volume miscellany Attic Nights he enjoyed, and Marcus Cornelius Fronto, an orator considered nearly Cicero’s equal. He also translated some of Horace’s odes and his De Arte Poetica into English.39 Another moment when Simonds betrayed a yearning for scholarship of some sort occurred on March 4, 1622, in London when he attended the wedding of Bathshua Reynolds, the daughter of his former school-master. He noted that she was considered “the greatest scholler, I thinke, of a woman in England,” and he delighted in the wedding party where “there was much companye, whence arose that which is the life of a scholler, good discourse.”40 At Cambridge, what little history he read was that of classical Rome, not Britain, but early in 1622 he mentioned a writing project involving British history for which he was taking notes. While vacationing at Busbridge, he found in his brother-in-law’s library a “rayling pasquill” against the 1621 Parliament and “moore especiallye against our late Queene Elizabeth of famous memorye.” Irritated by it, he began on March 20 to write an answer. Yet he realized that because his answer would be directed “cheiflye against papists,” he feared he would experience “some trouble” if he proceeded to publish it. This was because James I, then keen to marry his son to the Spanish infanta and thus taking a soft line toward papists, might take offense. By April 3 he was describing the project as a history of Elizabeth’s reign, and he kept researching it until he dropped it early in May, ostensibly because his legal studies were requiring too much of his time.41

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the discovery of “records” On Thursday, September 4, 1623, Simonds unwittingly took his first step toward becoming a historian of his own nation. The prosaic entry in his cipher diary reads: “After dinner I went to the Tower ther to see some records, and how I liked them, and through Gods mercye, happening upon a Charter of Edward the Confessors. I liked it well, and resolved to continue my course of my coming hither twice a weeke, through Gods assistance.”42 When he wrote his autobiography fourteen years later, he described that day and its consequences more portentously. On this first trip to the archives, the document he saw was “the charter by which Edward the Confessor confirmed Earle Harolds foundacion of Waltham Abbey. From this day forward I neuer whollie gaue ouer the studie of Records, but spent manie dayes & moneths about it to my great content & satisfaction.” He explained that he had set off to peruse documents in the Tower merely because he wanted to “finde out the matter of law conteined in them.” But he immediately realized that the parchments and papers he was reading contained “other excellencies . . . both historicall & nationall,” and he quickly became fascinated with the primary sources for the history of Britain that he would pursue for the rest of his life. His research convinced him that the quasi-mythical story of Britain’s origins that most of his contemporaries believed was deeply flawed. From the materials in the Tower, he moved on to Exchequer records and beyond, and he set himself an ambitious task. “If God shall permitt” and if “I bee not swallowed up of euill times,” he resolved “to restore to Great Brittaine its true Historie, the exactest that euer was yet penned of anie nation in the Christian worlde.”43 As he put it elsewhere, his intention was to use his beloved “Records & other exoticke monuments of antiquitie” to create his British history, but he could do it only if God defended “the truth of the gospell in England, without intermixtures of Pelagian heresies & Popish idolatries.”44 In the event, the “euill times” he had witnessed by 1638— the reverses suffered by the Protestant cause on the continent of Europe in the Thirty Years’ War and the rise of Arminianism in England—and those he had not yet experienced—the British civil wars of the 1640s—would prevent him from writing the history of Britain from the earliest times through the Norman Conquest that he continued to work on until service in the Long Parliament intervened. But the insights he gained from his researches would profoundly shape his understanding of the political and religious debates that roiled Britain under the early Stuarts. When Simonds wrote that he began to devote “many days and months” to his archival research, he was not exaggerating. After his first visit to the

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Tower on September 4, he returned on the twelfth and the seventeenth, usually after “dinner” (the mid-day meal) for the entire afternoon. He spent the afternoons of October 1, 8, and 17 at the Tower and the afternoons of five more days in his chamber writing annotations upon and otherwise perfecting his transcriptions of the documents he had read there.45 On November 5, he heard a sermon about “that act and shame of poperye,” the Gunpowder Plot, in the evening after spending the afternoon amid his “sweete records” in the Tower. That month saw him either back in the Tower archive or continuing his annotations on eight days, and in December the total was the same.46 It must be remembered that during this period, Simonds continued to meet his considerable responsibilities as a young barrister in the planning and execution of moots and other teaching exercises. In November 1623, his distractions included even the threat of a duel with a fellow Middle Temple man. At the Inns of Court, challenges to duels were not uncommon during this period.47 Simonds’s came from James Scudamore (1606–ca. 1631), a younger brother of the first viscount Scudamore. James would later serve in the Netherlands as a soldier and would there kill a Scottish captain in a duel shortly before his own early death.48 On Wednesday, November 12, Simonds gave “some sharpe words” to Scudamore because he was convinced that the man had “abused mee behind my backe.” Expecting a challenge, he recognized that his “honour, creditt, reputation, and all lay at the stake” if he refused to fight. He practiced his fencing, sought advice from his friends about what to do, and was pleased when one friend, Francis Boldero, offered to serve as his second. Boldero, also a gentleman from Suffolk, had first met Simonds in 1620. On Friday he was relieved to discover that he “needed not feare” because the challenge had been sent when Scudamore knew he was not at home. This meant that Scudamore “had little stomacke to it.” Nevertheless, Simonds went to the Tower as usual, but he wore his sword just in case his enemy confronted him. He took heart because he thought himselfe to be “a good deale the stronger.” Nevertheless, he was relieved that the challenge was not repeated and that a little later he and Scudamore “weere made freinds and chieflye of his offring.”49 As Simonds’s thirst for historical sources grew, he sought out other wells to drink from besides the archive at the Tower of London. The first visit to Sir Robert Cotton that he recorded occurred on April 9, 1624, of which he wrote that “wee had excellent discourse and especiallie concerning the danger and detestablenes of poperie since the Councel of Trent moore then before.”50 On September 28 he saw Cotton again, which he did “frequently” thereafter, and he described him as “England’s prime Antiquarie.”51 Cotton had moved to his house at Westminster in 1622, and

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it contained the famous library he had been assembling for four decades. Four stories high with twenty-one rooms, it was situated adjacent to the House of Commons and had access to the Thames through a garden. Cotton lent his manuscripts and books freely to peers, courtiers, diplomats, administrators, judges, lawyers, members of Parliament, bishops, antiquarians, historians, heralds, writers (including Ben Jonson), artists (including Inigo Jones)—and even King James I and Queen Anne.52 It is likely that Simonds perused some of Cotton’s treasures on one or more of these early occasions, but by May 1625 he was dropping in on Cotton whenever there were no cases in the Court of Common Pleas that interested him. Of those visits, he wrote: “I stepped aside into Sir Robert Cottons, & transcribed what I thought good out of some of his Manuscripts, or old written Bookes in parchment.”53 Next came borrowing from Cotton, and that appears to have begun in July when he got the loan of “the lawes of Henry I being in latine out of an olde parchment Manuscript in folio which Sir Robert Cotton had lent mee, being bound upp therin with diuers other particulars.” He still possessed the manuscript in December and January and spent much of the holiday making his “collections and transcriptions” from the “other rarities bound vpp together” with Henry I’s statutes. During the ensuing Hilary Term in 1626, he continued his regular sessions with Cotton at his house where he delighted in “the daylie renouacion of our friendshipp.” In February, he borrowed a manuscript copy of the Fleta (a late-thirteenth-century legal treatise) from Cotton and kept working on it whenever he could find the time in March and April.54 During a vacation at Busbridge in late March and April 1626, he ventured farther back in time by examining “an old Manuscript or written chartularie” of Worcester Abbey that had been written there by a monk named Hemmingus during the reign of William the Conqueror. The manuscript included deeds and charters in both Latin and Anglo-Saxon, and this was his earliest mention of the latter tongue. By the late 1630s, he would be deeply engaged in an effort to create an Anglo-Saxon–English dictionary, as we shall see.55 One might have thought that the vast resources of the Tower and the Cotton library would have been enough to keep a neophyte like Simonds D’Ewes busy in the mid-1620s, but that would be to underestimate his energy and his curiosity. On December 9, 1624, he traveled to Stow Hall to begin a family visit for the holiday season, but while there he worked steadily on his transcription of “a rare law Manuscript written in lawfrench, called the Mirroir aux Justices or Speculum Justiciarorum.” The copy he had borrowed for this task had been “reviewed” by Sir Francis Tate (1560–1616), described by Simonds as “a great antiquarie.” Tate was

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a Middle Temple bencher, judge, collector of manuscripts, and an early member of the Society of Antiquaries that had been founded in 1586 and which he served as secretary. In 1895 the great legal historian F. W. Maitland noted that the manuscript was first printed in 1642, “a marvellously appropriate date for the appearance of a book which proclaimed as the first and sovereign ‘abuse’ that the king is beyond the law to which he ought to be subject.”56 In October 1625, while visiting Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston at his home in Kediton (Suffolk), Simonds read and wrote annotations in the margin of “an elaborate Journall” he had on loan of the proceedings of the Parliament held in 1593.57 He did not mention whether the copies of the Mirroir and the Elizabethan Parliament that he used were Cotton’s, but even if they were it is certain that he was beginning to go farther afield to search out antiquities of various kinds. November 7, 1625, found him staying with his friend Sir Thomas Holland in southern Norfolk and calling upon John Harrison at Bressingham, just three miles from Holland’s seat at Quidenham. Harrison was, he related, “a great collector & storer of ancient Greeke & Romane coines,” and Simonds spoke with him about purchasing some of the coins. As it happened, nothing came of this until 1631, three years after Harrison’s death, by which time Simonds’s financial position gave him considerable freedom to collect books, manuscripts, and coins that he fancied.58 It cannot be doubted that Simonds sincerely aimed at producing works of scholarship for the public based on the “Records & other exoticke monuments of antiquitie” on which he increasingly doted after that memorable first visit to the Tower in 1623. However, by no means all of his study of these things had a public purpose. On June 31, 1624, after a short stay with Sir Martin Stuteville and his family at Dalham, he rode on to Stow Hall and discovered that his father had “exceedinglie enlarged & beautified” the manor house since his previous visit. On July 1, only ten months after his first plunge into primary sources at the Tower, he applied himself to the study of “the old euidences of the mannour of Stowlangtoft.” Landowners in early modern England took great care to preserve the “evidences” (that is, original documents concerning land transactions) that proved their ownership of the various parts of their estates because they might need to produce them in court if someone challenged their titles. Such lawsuits constituted the largest single category of legal business for common lawyers. In the absence of a government-operated procedure for the surveying and registration of transactions involving real property, the landowning family that failed to preserve and protect its “evidences” risked catastrophe. Since Simonds would in due course inherit Stowlangtoft from his father, his interest in the documents comes as no surprise. He

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perused them, he reported, “with much delight hauing now by my studie of Recordes gotten reasonable skill & abilitie in the reading of those old handes & characters in which the elder deedes had been written for about fiue hundred yeares.”59 In other words, his months of study in the Tower had enabled him to read things that many of his fellow gentlemen could not make out. Simonds’s study of the papers and parchments at Stowlangtoft led him to conclusions that would have surprised and perhaps irritated the villagers had they known about them. He wrote that he “easilie discouered” from the documents that the old deeds demonstrated that “the ancient appellacion of the towne had been singlie Stowe” and that “the familie of Langetot” had been its owners from the Conqueror’s era until the early thirteenth century. Whereas the locals “had a fond & idle tradition constantlie beleeued & reported amongst them, that the village was called Stowlangthorne from a lanterne” atop the steeple of the church, they were, he concluded, quite wrong. Instead, the name was a corrupted version of the Norman surname “Langetot,” and the irrelevant lantern had somehow led the residents to a bogus etymology for the name of their own village.60 In this period, the word “fond” meant foolish, idiotic, and silly, the sort of thing that only the ignorant and credulous would believe. Clearly this is the connotation Simonds had in mind, as we do for those who are taken in by old wives’ tales or the “urban legends” beloved of tabloid newspapers. His immersion in medieval manuscripts, first at the Tower in 1623 and then elsewhere, had led him systematically to doubt conventional wisdom and to insist on documentary evidence and firsthand sources where the past was concerned. He would, as we shall see, apply this way of thinking to both public and private subjects. From this time on, when visiting his friends at their houses in the country, he would delve into their “evidences” for reliable information about their genealogies, and he would doggedly seek accuracy in their family trees instead of settling for the “fond & idle” stories that satisfied many either because they were venerable or because they flattered local or family pride. He would be no less relentless in his insistence on historical accuracy when he turned his attention to the history of Great Britain and of Christianity within it. the d’ewes saga Keen though he was on the story of the manor that Paul D’Ewes had bought in 1614, Simonds was much more intrigued by the D’Ewes genealogy. He interrogated his father repeatedly about aspects of the family’s history, and he conducted his own researches into it with energy and zeal.

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Jottings he made in a small commonplace book on the subject of what he called “pedigrees & descent” show that he was aware of the dangers that lay in an excessive and overly self-interested attention to such things. “To search too much discouers a little frothye pride especiallye wheere enough is known to make a man valued as much as if hee had moore.” Pride was a sin to which he knew himself predisposed. But, he continued, to have no interest at all in one’s pedigree “is base & sordid especiallye where time or some interruption hath obscured it.”61 In his autobiography, he opined that he had always “accounted it a great outward blessing to bee well descended” because an honorable ancestry was “the guift only of God and nature.” Although kings might raise their “basest vassals to wealth & honour,” even they were powerless “to make them anciently or nobly extracted.” Moreover, those advanced “vpon a sudden” had often fallen under “the contempt & scorne of the truly ancient nobility” and especially so when their “flatterers” had encouraged them to “pretend to an adulterated & false extraction.” Simonds insisted that his research into the origins of his own family had as a goal “the naked & simple truth; I euer accounted the meanest rise truly deduced of greater value, then all the spurious & faigned pedigrees that witt or inuention could cogg and frame.” Yet he also stressed the fact that “many great & ancient families” had suffered “ecclipses & interruptions” which led to erroneous judgments about them. In such cases, families came to be considered recent upstarts when instead they were “truly ancient & ennobled” dynasties whose “primeue originall” had been obscured in the mist of time.62 Simonds believed that his own family tree was scarred by not one but two “ecclipses” caused by the fog of war in the case of his great-grandfather and by the disastrous second marriage of his great-grandmother to a gold-digger, which blighted his grandfather’s prospects. His great-grandfather, Adrian D’Ewes, immigrated to England from the Netherlands because he was “wearied by the intestine warrs” in Gelderland by the Habsburg and Egmont dynasties seeking to “assert & vindicate” their claim to the duchy by force. In it lay the town and castle of Kessel, and Simonds thought that Adrian was lineally descended from a line of “the Lordes or Dynasts” of Kessel. The first of these men of whom Simonds knew about was “Geerardt Des Ewes Lorde of Kessel [who] married Anne, daughter of the Earle of Horne” in about 1400. Simonds’s authority for his great-grandfather’s aristocratic heritage was a document “sett downe in latine” by the “principall herauld” of the Duke of Cleves. The official seal of the herald’s office was “affixed by a labell of silke vnto it, on which labell it hung being of redd wax.” According to this resplendent testimonial, the son and heir of Geerardt Des Ewes, also named Geerardt,

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married Anne van Hulst of Juliers, and their heir (yet another Geerardt) espoused Mary van Loë of Antwerp. This second Geerardt and his wife were the parents of the Adrian D’Ewes who settled himself in the parish of St. Michael Bassishaw in London at some point during the reign of Henry VIII. Unfortunately for Simonds, the terrible fire in the Six Clerks’ Office in 1621 destroyed this document and many other pieces of evidence concerning his origins.63 John Bruce was highly skeptical about the family history Simonds laboriously constructed. Writing in 1846, he asserted that Simonds’s pathetic social aspirations made him dream “of mighty ancestors, dwelling long ages ago in Zealand.” So strong was his belief in these forebears, Bruce continued, that he “came to believe in their past existence, and marry them to great heiresses, and hunt through records to find them out.”64 Kessel is as far from Zeeland as one can go in the southern Netherlands, an indication that Bruce did not trouble himself greatly about the Dutch background to D’Ewes’s account. He did not quite say it, but his choice of words suggests that he thought that the Six Clerks’ fire gave Simonds an opportunity he could not resist to invent the story about the magnificent document from the Duke of Cleves’s herald. There were indeed lords of Kessel named Des Ewes in the appropriate period, but even if Bruce knew that he might still have had wondered whether Simonds fabricated his linkage to them. In another essay, Bruce wrote that the claim to an aristocratic ancestry was a “pretty tale” that Simonds and his father came to believe simply because they reiterated it so frequently. Bruce found it hard to accept that “somebody’s recollection of what was written on the burnt parchment” was sufficient proof of the matter.65 That Simonds believed it is certain, but Bruce’s insinuation of credulousness at best and mendacity at worst on his part requires an evaluation. If D’Ewes had been the sort of person who would invent proof of his origins or ignore facts that reflected poorly on them, it is unlikely that he would have included in his autobiography the admission that he had made an intensive but unsuccessful search through the Rolls office in Chancery Lane and of an abstract he had of the patent rolls from Henry VIII’s reign to find proof that Adrian had achieved the status of a “denizen” in England. Therefore, he concluded, his great-grandfather must have “liued and died heer an alien.” This meant that in law his real property went to the Crown and not to his son Geerardt, Paul D’Ewes’s father. Simonds further confirmed this by information he had from his father about various houses in London that Adrian owned when he died, houses that his son “could neuer recover.”66 Simonds speculated that Adrian had not sought denization because he planned, “if once the deafe eares of warre might bee opened by a well setled peace” in his homeland,

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to return there and regain the high rank, properties, and powers he had left behind.67 One significant piece of evidence, however, was found in the ashes. It was Adrian’s seal that he brought from his homeland and “was soe prized by him that at his death (as I haue it testified by my fathers handwriting) hee bequeathed it to remaine to his family as an hereditarye monument.” Paul, knowing his son’s “desire to discouer & preserue all monuments that concerned his family,” gave the silver seal, engraved with the D’Ewes crest and coat of arms, to Simonds.68 The survival of the seal when it had been hot enough to melt several thousand twenty-shilling gold coins particularly raised Bruce’s suspicions.69 Yet fires are unpredictable and often uneven in their effects, and the seal might have been in a more protected location than the coins. Further evidence of Simonds’s insistence on solid proof in all matters genealogical and historical comes from his treatment of information that he received from Robert Ryece of Preston, Suffolk, a country gentleman and renowned antiquarian. Ryece told him orally and sent letters confirming his recollections from notes from “some bookes of forraigne genealogies” he had seen long before but could no longer locate. Ryece reported that the great-grandparents of the first Geerardt in his family tree, the one first named by the herald, were Adolph Des Ewes and his wife, Adelheida (daughter of Wolrave of Namurs). Ryece also identified the next two generations: Lewes Des Ewes and Zachareia (daughter of Englebert of Nassau); Otho Des Ewes and Maud (daughter of Arnulph of Friesland). Simonds, gratified but still cautious, wrote: “I cannot deny but I should haue prized this addition at as high a rate as a couetous muckworme would haue done a good summe of golde, could I haue seen the authorities on which they weere grounded.” Lacking that certainty, he decided to insert the names into his descent accompanied by a statement about “the doubtfullness of them.” He felt he had to record this reservation because otherwise he risked turning “coniectures into certainties” instead of sticking to his “sinceare endeauor to discouer truth only.”70 Although it could still be objected that he was trying to have it both ways about data that suited his predilections, his seriousness about having trustworthy evidence for his conclusions was quite real. If Simonds’s great-grandfather made one costly mistake by not seeking denization in England, he made another one when he named his widow as the sole executrix of his estate while leaving nothing to his children. He presumably trusted her to make appropriate bequests to the children in her own will. Simonds thought that he might have been following the custom in his native land, whereas in England the usual practice was to insert specific bequests to the children rather than leave all the decisions

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entirely to the widow. Here we come to the second “eclipse” in the history of the D’Ewes family—the story of his grandfather Geerardt. As a result of his poverty, Geerardt was, as Simonds regretted, “enforced to betake himselfe to a citty life.”71 Simonds considered it “a great blessing of a higher hande” that when Adrian died in London in July 1551 he was “a blessed Protestant,” having benefited from the spread of “the truth of the gospell” during the reign of “that mirrour of Princes Englands zealous Josiah,” Edward VI.72 Adrian had married Alice Ravenscroft, “an Englishwoman of a good familie” from Lancashire, but her upbringing did not help her avoid what Simonds called her “vnfortunate second marriage.” Alice’s second husband, William Ramsey, plotted to support his profligate habits by taking the remainder of Adrian’s estate that had not been forfeited to the Crown. Alice’s effort to preserve some cash for her eldest son failed when she “hidd vpp 1000 markes in gold in one little cupboard in a chimney.” Ramsey, a man who could smell money, noticed that she repeatedly glanced toward the chimney, and he made away with it.73 Paul D’Ewes told Simonds that his father, Geerardt, was a London citizen who had married an English widow, Grace Hynde, and she was pregnant with her late husband’s child when they married. The child she was carrying died young. Grace came from a landowning family in Cambridge, and she brought with her lands that yielded £40 a year that she and Geerardt sold.74 The first child of their marriage was named Paul, but he too soon died. Their second child, born in 1567, was another boy, and he ought, Simonds asserted, to have been given one of the “vsuall names” in the family, such as Adrian or Geerardt. At the baptismal font, however, the godfathers quarreled over the name the lad should have, and the presiding clergyman, nettled by their “vnseasonable strife,” baptized him “Paul” because it happened to be the feast of the conversion of St. Paul (January 25). After relating the strange way in which his father had received his Christian name, Simonds sternly concluded that parents should decide upon the names of their children and that “it becomes witnesses in common ciuility to leaue that power wholly to them.”75 Geerardt (or Garret) D’Ewes, despite the disadvantages placed upon him early in his life, must have been a man of considerable talents. He represented himself with an ingenious device or trademark that William Camden praised highly. It shows two men playing at dice in a garret, one of whom has just thrown a deuce (hence, “garret deuce” for Geerardt D’Ewes).76 He became a London publisher and an officer of the Station­ ers’ Company, and he held the queen’s patent for works in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He imported books from Antwerp and had a bookshop in St. Paul’s churchyard, the center of the publishing industry.77 Paul told

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Simonds that he had overheard private conversations in which his father expressed his regret to his mother “that hee was fallen soe farre below his ancestors, as hee desired to forget whence hee was descended.” Simonds wrote, however, that God had so rewarded his grandfather’s endeavors as to enable him to marry their daughter Alice to William Lathum, “a descendant of a most anciently extracted family, & then a prime match” in Essex. This was his “Aunt Lathum,” with whom he frequently stayed a night or two when traveling back and forth between Stowlangtoft and London in the 1620s. Yet even after her dowry of £3,000 was paid, Geerardt left Paul £7,000, the “faire foundacion” on which Paul built the estate he left to Simonds.78 By the time he died in 1591, Geerardt had clearly more than overcome the poverty into which his parents’ missteps had pitched him. As Simonds wrote, some years before his death he left London and settled in Essex, where he owned two manors and lived “a cuntry gentlemans life.” Ever the indefatigable researcher, Simonds obtained a copy of “the inquisicion found after his death,” which confirmed that Geerardt had “the style & title of a gentleman . . . with escocheons of his coate armour . . . befitting his ancient & noble extraction.”79 John Bruce failed to raise a further logical objection to the “pretty tale” that Paul and especially Simonds went to so much trouble to establish about their aristocratic origins. If, Bruce might have asked, Simonds was so utterly convinced of his position as the sole heir to high rank and wealth in what had become by his time a new European state, the Dutch Republic (or United Provinces), then why did he not try to reclaim it for himself? Given his lawyerly knowledge of property rights, perhaps Sim­ onds’s inaction was significant. That he did not might argue that the principal purpose of his ardent genealogical industry was merely to boost his claim to aristocratic status in England and even to support the idea that he knew his case was without merit. The Emperor Charles V had redrawn the provincial borders of Gelderland and overhauled its complex administrative and political structure in the late 1540s. This and the further complications following the Dutch Revolt against Philip II would surely have made an attempt by Geerardt or Paul to regain their patrimony difficult. Yet, by the 1620s the Dutch economic “miracle” was well under way. The Dutch state was internally peaceful and starting to look durable. As we shall see in the next section, however, Simonds kept himself thoroughly informed about the movements of Habsburg armies in the Thirty Years’ War that had begun in 1618 and their victories over the Protestant forces depressed and frightened him. Like many of his countrymen, he feared that the Habsburg forces would overrun northern Europe and invade Britain itself.

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If Simonds so much as thought of reasserting his claims in Gelderland—and there is no evidence that he did—his knowledge of the danger to Protestantism on the Continent would have given him pause. Moreover, Simonds recognized that in England, the family’s recovery had already begun during his grandfather’s life. The eclipse of the D’Ewes fortunes was ending, and Simonds was deeply grateful that “God hath pleased to bestow great outward blessings vpon mee farr beyond my deserte.”80 If the family was not yet “fully restored” in Paul or himself, God had nevertheless done wonders for them. Divine providence had shone upon them in England, and he might have worried that to grasp for his rightful place in the Dutch aristocracy would have displeased God as a sign of his ingratitude. He knew that his grandfather had usually spoken Dutch at home, and he had a copy of a likeness of his great-grandmother at age eighty “apparailed after the manner of the Gelderland women.” But he also knew himself to be thoroughly English.81 He would later have friends with whom he corresponded in Amsterdam and Leiden, and his dearest friend would be the Dutch ambassador to England. His brother, Richard, undertook an early version of the “grand tour” in the late 1630s, regularly corresponding with Simonds, who remained in Suffolk. But Simonds himself never set foot out of southern England, and the only place that he ever considered immigrating to was not Kessel in the Netherlands but Massachusetts in New England. He took pride in his family tree and coveted the social recognition he believed his “truly ancient & ennobled” ancestors possessed, but his principal concern was about his faith. If he were to leave England, it would be for the sake of religion, not rank. Regardless of Bruce’s doubts about the validity of Simonds’s claims to a lordship in Gelderland, his statement that he had “out of Church-Registers & publike recordes infalliblye prooued my auncestors since my family was setled in England” is perfectly sound.82 For example, he visited the church of St. Michael Bassishaw in the City of London on June 7, 1625, and found the entry recording the death of Adrian D’Ewes on July 16, 1551 in “the first & most ancient Register of the Christenings marriages and burials” there. “This discouerie,” he exulted, “gaue mee extraordinarie satisfaction,” partly because it was the first “vndoubted proofe” he saw about his great-grandfather’s death and partly because the date and month were precisely those his father had “long before” told him. Without a reliable written record, nothing that depended on oral traditions would satisfy him. He added that the family story that Adrian had died of the “sweating sicknes” became much more plausible when his research produced many reports of deaths due to that illness in 1551.83 In remembrance of his grandfather he paid to install a funeral monument in the parish church of St. Laurence at

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Upminster in Essex near Geerardt’s manor of Gains (now Gaynes). Also, in the church in the parish of St. Michael Bassishaw he placed “a monument in glasse with a large inscription” to his paternal great-grandparents.84 When he was in London in June 1627, Simonds obtained from Sir Richard St. George, the Clarenceux King of Arms, a coat of arms for his father; it featured a gold wolf’s head “with a collar bezantee about the necke.” He believed that this was “the ancient coate” of his family, and he and his father “vsed it in a seale before this grant & confirmacion of it.”85 Simonds also tried to discover as much as he could about the maternal side of his family tree, not just because of his deep love for his mother and her parents but also because he genuinely wanted to know all that could be known about his predecessors. His mother’s mother was the daughter of William and Ellen Stephens of Kent, and Ellen was the daughter and heir of “a Louelace (as hath been receaued by tradicion).” Simonds remembered seeing at Coxden his grandfather Symonds’s “coatarmour empaled with Louelece & Eynsham” affixed on the chimney piece. These connections had been represented in the “funerall escocheons” of his grandfather and his mother, and he knew of no reason why he could not add them to his own coat of arms. But he did not do it: “yet soe sinceere hath my proceeding been in the searching out of these truthes as I haue yet forborne” including them “because I first desired to haue some proofe of them.” He thought his grandfather had valid documentary evidence on these points, but the documents were gone. He knew this because his own father had removed all the “writings” from Coxden to his office in London where they burned in the 1621 fire.86 Nor did he get very far pursuing the lineage of his mother’s father, although he made two interesting finds. First, grandfather Symonds’s father, Thomas, was the “naturall sonne” of Sir Giles Strangeways of Melbury Sampford in Dorsetshire, a fact confirmed in a letter to Simonds from Sir John Strangeways in 1636.87 Thomas married Agnes, the daughter of “Richard Femel a wealthy Dutchman whoe came out of Normandye into England.” This led Simonds to conclude that, with Dutch ancestors on both sides, he had good reason to “vote well” with the Dutch. This was not only because they were “the ancient & most faithfull allies of this crowne of Englande” but also because they remained staunch opponents of the Habsburgs and therefore the allies that England and indeed Protestantism itself needed desperately as the Thirty Years’ War continued.88 By the time he began the writing of his autobiography in 1636, Simonds knew that “the diuine hand” had given him “a liberall estate” in England that, especially with the addition of his wife’s inheritance, would “moore . . . enrich the bloud of my posterity . . . then by all those of my ancestors which preceded.” What had been lost

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in Gelderland was unlikely to be regained but for his purposes was no longer needed.89 So far as the archives in the Tower of London were concerned, Simonds’s career as a historian suffered a five-year interruption that began early in 1626. Although his mornings taking notes at the Court of Common Pleas continued, his idyllic afternoons in the Tower ended, perhaps because, as he himself admitted, he had become “too highlie conceited of the exoticke knowledge” he was recovering from the ancient documents. Therefore, he suspected that it was “the diuine hande” that on February 25 led Sir John Borough, the keeper of the records in the Tower, to create “a frivolous difference” with him. It is easy to imagine scenarios in which the proud and prickly young lawyer said something that provoked a sharp response from an official. Or perhaps Borough was the aggressor. Simonds provided no details other than to say that he decided to “discontinue” his efforts there. His marriage occurred in October, followed by long periods of living away from London. For the next five years, other preoccupations kept him from such research except when he had “some speciall occasion, to see some whole copies or transcripts compared.” On those occasions, he observed that he found the work of Borough’s “clerkes verie faithles & negligent.” When, other than perusing abstracts, he was finally able to return to serious scholarly investigations after his father’s death in 1631, he avoided the Tower, where his enemy Borough “still continued Keeper of those precious monuments.” Instead he turned his attention to “the moore rare and moore usefull Records of the Exchequer.” No less important, since he could finally afford it, he began to buy “diuers ancient Manuscripts” to pore over in his own growing collection. He did it, as he said, “somewhat to satisfie my curiositie.” Although he later decided that his early purchases had little value, he continued to collect manuscripts and books for the rest of his life and to create an enviable library. The fascination for primary sources that had begun on his first day in the Tower in 1623 never left him, even though his contretemps with Borough led him to explore new venues.90 the earldom of oxford Simonds’s quarrel with Borough and the resulting halt to his trufflehound-like activity in the Tower of London did not mean that his historical researches ceased. In the early months of 1626 he was busily cementing his friendship with Sir Robert Cotton while continuing his reading in Cotton’s library. They pored over documents together in order to support the effort of Robert de Vere to defend his claim to the earldom of Oxford. His wealthy rival for the title, Robert Bertie, Lord Willoughby de Eresby,

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was, according to Simonds, “certainlie verie meane & ordinarie in the male line,” whereas Robert de Vere, although he was “the true & rightfull Earle,” was impoverished and living on his meager salary as a captain in the service of the Dutch Republic. Ironies abounded in this episode, one of which is that the centuries-old de Vere grip on the famous title had as its champion a soldier fighting in the cause of upstart, bourgeois rebels against the venerable Habsburg dynasty. Simonds and Cotton, “pitying the meane condicion of the saied Robert de Vere,” rolled up their sleeves and put their historical skills to work to defend his claim when it came before the House of Lords. The outcome was a split decision. De Vere lost the prestigious (but purely ceremonial) office of Great Chamberlain long held by the earls of Oxford, and Bertie obtained it, along with a new title as earl of Lindsey. But de Vere did hang on to the earldom of Oxford, thanks in large measure to the help he received from an old antiquarian and his young apprentice. Simonds must have sent a copy of their findings to Stuteville because he asked Sir Martin to lend to Sir William Spring, Oxford’s kinsman, “the report yow haue of my Lorde of Oxfordes case.”91 In another letter to Stuteville written in March 1626, he asked his friend to forward the report to Joseph Mede in Cambridge after it was returned by Spring. Mede was to send it to two others who wanted to read it.92 Sir William resided at Pakenham only two miles west of Stowlangtoft, and he and Simonds had become friends in London during the Parliament of 1624. Simonds had then mentioned to his father that he had begun to meet with Spring often and come to “to valew [him] highlye.”93 Spring was so taken with the de Vere document that he praised it in the most extravagant terms in a letter he sent to Simonds late in 1626 at the Middle Temple. He related that, after receiving it from Stuteville, he had read it with “much delight” and taken the liberty of having a copy made for himself and lent it to Sir John Heigham. Yet Spring worried that the prodigious labors that the work on the report must have required might damage the author’s health. He begged Simonds to refresh himself by visiting his friends in Suffolk, thereby preserving the “light of soe much knowledge to shine about ye Commonwealth” instead of immuring himself in his “owne howse or chamber.”94 Simonds noted that as a result of his campaign on the earl’s behalf, he won—to his “exceeding great satisfaction”—the friendship of two men. One was Sir Horace Vere, made Baron Vere of Tilbury in 1625, a long-serving and distinguished commander of English soldiers in the Netherlands and a leading figure among the aristocratic Calvinists. 95 At one point, as we shall see, Simonds expressed interest in marrying one of Vere’s daughters. The other was Sir Albert Joachimi, a Dutchman who shared

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Simonds’s intense Calvinism, had been knighted by James I, and came to England as his country’s ambassador to England. Sir Theodore Mayerne, the eminent physician, would become Joachimi’s son-in-law in 1630, and Mayerne’s clients included members of the French and English royal families.96 Joachimi would even become a surrogate father to Simonds after Paul D’Ewes’s death in 1631. Their frequent and intimate correspondence will play a prominent role in the next three chapters of this book. What must be underscored here is the close relationship that existed between Simonds’s research activities, the factional and ideological struggles that went on at the courts of James I and Charles I, and the connection of these in turn with the massive international conflict that raged throughout most of western Christendom during the first half of the seventeenth century.

The Newshound in London Throughout the 1620s and 1630s, European princes and their councillors, diplomats, and military men found themselves overwhelmingly preoccupied with the Thirty Years’ War, a struggle that H. G. Koenigsberger rightly termed “the European Civil War.”97 It began with an episode that guaranteed that the English would follow its complicated course with obsessive interest. In 1618 the Protestant nobility of Bohemia rebelled against the decision of their new king, Ferdinand (soon to become the Holy Roman Emperor as Ferdinand II), to curtail the religious freedom they had enjoyed under his predecessor. Famously, they tossed two of Ferdinand’s ambassadors and a secretary out of a third-floor window of the Hradschin Palace (“the defenestration of Prague”). The Bohemians then invited the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, to accept election as their king, an office the Habsburgs considered rightfully theirs. Frederick, a Calvinist, was James I’s son-in-law, having married the Princess Elizabeth in London in 1612. Against James’s advice, Frederick accepted the Bohemian throne, and he and Elizabeth enjoyed their coronations at St. Vitus’s Cathedral in Prague early in November 1619. Late in 1620, however, Spanish forces invaded the Lower Palatinate, and Catholic troops defeated Frederick’s at the Battle of White Mountain near Prague. The royal couple, after a Bohemian reign of scarcely a year, fled the day after the battle. Deprived not only of the elective crown of Bohemia but soon afterward the hereditary rule of the Palatinate, they remained exiles in the Netherlands for the rest of their lives. They and their offspring embodied for Simonds D’Ewes and his friends “the Protestant cause” that lay close to their hearts. Moreover, between the death of Prince Henry in 1612 and the birth of the first child of Charles I and Henrietta Maria in 1630, Elizabeth was next in line for the throne of England after her brother Charles. If he had died childless, the

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Crown of England would have gone to her or, had she died, to her eldest son. We know from hindsight that the heirs of the Elector Palatine and his wife did not reign in England until George I succeeded Queen Anne in 1714, but in Simonds’s time all informed people knew that it could have happened at any moment between 1612 and 1630 (or even later if Charles’s children had died young). As we shall see, Simonds would later send Elizabeth (the “Queen of Bohemia”) advice aimed at burnishing her sons’ prospects. After Frederick’s loss of his territories, King James renewed his effort to arrange a marriage of his son and heir Charles to the Infanta Maria of Spain in the hope that the Spanish Habsburgs would restore the Palatinate in return for an English alliance. The push for this “Spanish match” was for Simonds and his friends a horrific danger until its final failure late in 1623. Foreign capitals such as Prague, Vienna, and Madrid lay far from England, and some historians have thought that people in the English countryside neither knew nor much cared about news emanating from such places. Simonds, however, gathered news about the catastrophe in Bohemia and the diplomacy that preceded and followed it with great energy. His autobiography, correspondence, and diaries are stuffed with information about what he called “publike occurences” domestic and foreign.98 In the autobiography, he inserted the public news mixed in with his private thoughts and activities week by week; then at each year’s end he wrote an analytical summary of the year’s news. Diplomatic negotiations, the formation of alliances, the movements of armies and navies, the course and outcomes of battles and sieges, the rise and fall of councillors and favorites, the appointments and advancements of bishops and judges, and the proceedings of parliaments are all there. The account of the battle of White Mountain in his autobiography is a good example of his reportage. It is richly detailed and bristling with his opinions, loyalties, and hopes. The news of the catastrophe reached him soon after he came to London to initiate his legal studies. Simonds noted that he “saw a copie of a letter latelie come, from some partes of Germanie” that portrayed what he called “the calamitous & almost forlorne condicion of the Prince Elector Palatines affaires, both in Bohemia” (where the combined Imperial and Bavarian armies attacked him) and in the Lower (or Rhenish) Palatinate, where twenty-seven thousand “able men & most of them old souldiers” led by Marquess Spinola had crossed the Rhine. Meanwhile the duke of Saxony, although a Lutheran, was marching his “potent armie” to the Emperor Ferdinand’s side, having spurned the pleas of “the Landgraue of Hessen, the other Euangelicall princes and of the Bohemians themselues.”99 Although utterly devoted to Frederick’s cause, Simonds did not flinch

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from identifying the failings of his hero when the information he had required it. He wrote that before the battle, which was fought “vnder the verie walls” of Prague, the Bohemians lacked for “neither men monie nor warlike prouision.” The Imperialists, led by Maximilian Duke of Bavaria, won decisively, killing six thousand of Frederick’s troops while suffering only three hundred deaths on their side. Frederick had enough men to have been victorious, but he squandered his advantages. The Imperialists triumphed, and “scarce euer was ther so great a victorie gotten with soe little losse.” The rout started when the nine thousand members of Frederick’s Hungarian cavalry “verie treacherouslie & baselie fledd at the verie beginning,” thereby causing “the discouragement of the rest of the armie.” Frederick himself then made things much worse by taking flight into Silesia. Simonds argued that the Elector should have sent his family to safety, remained in the field himself, and led a counterattack that the Imperialists were not expecting. If he had done so, “his enemies could neuer haue made soe great a purchase at soe easie a rate.” Having criticized Frederick harshly, Simonds nevertheless found a bit of comfort in the bad news. Maximilian blundered badly by letting Frederick and his family get away when they were within his reach.100 This led Simonds to conclude that God’s “great wisdom” in these reverses could be seen in the way that he moderated “his chastenings sent vpon this hig[h]borne Prince & his roiall spouse, as though ther losses prooued fatall & irreparable, yet hee neuer gaue them vpp to the fetters & scornes of ther enemies.” Cold comfort indeed, and Simonds’s summation about the effect of all this was bleak: “Most sadd & dolefull weer these tidings to all true protestant hearts in England, each able iudgment fearing that it would” ultimately lead to “the vtter & generall subuersion of Gods true church.”101 d’ewes’s sources for news Nowadays “the news” is immediately available via television, the Internet, and daily newspapers. Astonishingly, however, Simonds D’Ewes may have been at least as well informed (albeit not as quickly) as many in the twenty-first century, even though electronic media did not exist and serial journalism in the form of “newsbooks” did not begin to appear frequently and regularly in England until 1642. European monarchs considered that the news was theirs to monopolize and dispense publicly only when it suited them. Newshounds throughout the Stuart kingdoms knew that the king and the clerical licensers who monitored the printing presses disliked the circulation of information about events in the realm of politics and tried to restrict it. In his diary entry for June 21, 1623, Simonds noted that King James had issued certain instructions to the members of the

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Inns of Court. They learned of these orders “by worde of mouth” from a bencher who had it from the judges, and the order stated “that wee should talke noe newes nor talke of kings nor compare one king with another.” In addition, the king demanded that the lawyers should wear their caps and stop wearing boots. James, ever suspicious of lawyers, knew that the Inns were hothouses in which the seeds of political gossip sprouted and spread widely. He probably knew that his verbal orders would not have much effect, and Simonds calmly noted that “these things weere patientlye heard, but the vacation following totally brooken.” In other words, they had at best a momentary impact that passed as quickly as a summer squall. Indeed, the very next day was a Sunday, on which Simonds heard a sermon by his friend Dr. Masters in the morning. Masters was the Master of the Temple Church and thus the principal resident preacher for the members of the Middle and Inner Temples (two of the four Inns of Court). After studying “divine matters” in the afternoon, he heard another sermon in the evening. “After supper, as I usually did, going to visit Mr. Masters and falling into discourse of the Spanish match, hee told mee that he was of opinion they did not yett know in Spaine what to doe with the Prince, nor how to make ther best advantage of him.”102 D’Ewes later described Masters as “a uerie reuerend & learned diuine” to whom he took his “theologicall doubts & scruples” and from whom he received “great content & satisfaction” throughout his years at the Middle Temple.103 It is evident from Simonds’s diary that Masters routinely conducted a Sunday evening salon at which talk of foreign and domestic political events and their implications for the Protestant cause in Europe was the norm. Thus, the very evening after James’s demand that the lawyers “talke noe news,” his quest for a Spanish alliance was the main topic of discussion in Masters’s room in the Middle Temple. The discussion on July 7, 1622, focused on “divers matters concerning our King and government, intermixing our poore prayers and sighes for it, for it appeared plainelye that the kings base feare was the cause of his lukewarmnes, both at home and abroad.” By “lukewarmnes,” he meant the king’s failure to strike aggressively on behalf of the Elector Palatine and the “Protestant cause.” On January 16, 1624, there was “much serious and politicke discourse of Cranfeild, the now Treasurour” and his “hastie and clownish disposition.”104 Obviously, James’s effort to shut down discussions of news in legal London had failed utterly. In addition, it is clear that Simonds’s notion of the proper sanctification of the Sabbath did not exclude discussion of and indeed hearing gossip about politics at the royal court and beyond it, especially when these bore on the fortunes of international Calvinism.

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For Simonds, three conduits of news flowed bountifully. First, as a law student at the Middle Temple, he dined daily among judges and lawyers who shuttled back and forth from the palace of Westminster to their Inns daily during the law terms. On January 4, 1623, for example, he “understood from Mr Warre, an ancient gentleman of our howse” that the Spanish marriage for Prince Charles was “in too great a state of forwardnes.”105 He was therefore well placed to find the answers about who was “in” and who was “out” so far as royal favor and royal appointments to office were concerned, because these were the subject of daily conversations in the halls and chambers of the Inns of Court. Many of the men who lived in the Inns spent much of their time just a half an hour’s walk from Westminster, where the decisions were made and the politics behind them played out. Some were members of the Privy Council, the high courts, or other important governing institutions. Some were at odds with the king on certain issues and were not averse to “leaking” information that would serve their purposes or “spinning” it to their ends. Foreign news might be particularly difficult to achieve certainty about. When Simonds looked back on the stories that arrived about the Battle of White Mountain, he wrote that “all this Michalmas terme this great losse was reported diuers­ly sometimes to bee on the King of Bohemia’s parte & at other times on the Emperors, nor did I heare the full & certain truth though I resided then in London & dailie enquired after it.” He was not confident that the terrible news was genuine until late in December. For most of that period, he “remained in Commons in the Middle Temple” and thus had access to “the best intelligence the towne afforded.”106 Occasionally, he went to Westminster or Whitehall and observed newsworthy events firsthand instead of relying on reports from others. When a Parliament was in session, the volume of gossip and news and the number of informants in the discussion shot upward. During one particularly exciting stage of Parliament of 1624, Simonds noted that “the great expectation and continuall discourse of matters now in agitation in parliament” was such that he could spare scarcely a moment for legal study.107 Second, Simonds was a contributor to and recipient of news passed around in newsletters and correspondence by a circle of gentry and university correspondents during the 1620s and 1630s. Professional newsletter writers such as John Pory, John Chamberlain, and Joseph Mede helped meet the demand for news in this form, and it was supplemented by the efforts of those (like the antiquarian Ralph Starkey) who employed groups of copyists to turn out “separates” (hand-copied reports of recent events, proscribed books, parliamentary speeches, and the like).108 Simonds’s third conduit was the still small but growing volume of

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printed pamphlets that contained (or purported to contain) news and occasionally even made news, such as Thomas Scott’s Vox Populi, or Newes from Spayne. Published anonymously late in 1620, it contained, as Simonds put it, “manye ierkes at the Spaniarde, and much commendation for the Low Cuntries and good caveats for our King and State, had it pleased God we could have observed them.”109 One of Scott’s arguments that resonated powerfully with Simonds concerned Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, count of Gondomar and the Spanish ambassador to the court of James I. Scott argued that Gondomar had pursued two goals that aimed at the ruination of England. According to Simonds, the first was “to breed distasts & iealousies in the King towardes his best subjects vnder the false & adulterate nickname of Puritanes, & soe to preuent all future Parliaments.” Note his bedrock conviction that defense of the Reformed religion and of representative institutions were inextricably linked. The second was to foment “iarrs & differences” between the English and the Dutch (the only other western European state with an effective national assembly), the better to make each subject to “Spaine & the howse of Austria.”110 Since Simonds was both a Puritan and a friend to the Dutch Republic, it is no wonder that he sympathized with Scott’s position. The infuriated authorities went after both the author and the printers, but Scott escaped to the Netherlands while first his printed pamphlet and later manuscript copies of it circulated widely and provoked heated discussions. When any noteworthy pamphlet appeared in print, Simonds quickly sought a copy. On June 20, 1623, for example, he mentioned in his diary that he had seen a Latin letter that Pope Gregory XV had written in April to Prince Charles urging him to restore Britain to Roman Catholicism. When this letter was printed, Simonds obtained a copy for himself. On October 26, he entered into his diary a brief account of the “famous accident” at the French embassy in Black Friars. “A great English Iesuite” was preaching to “persons of the popish side” there when the floor collapsed, killing ninety-one people. Aside from labeling it “the speciall worke of God,” he wrote little more because “ther weere twoe severall bookes printed of it, both which I have.”111 Simonds also had a standing order with a stationer, Samuel Albyn, for copies of royal proclamations and other printed news. The arrangement was that when Simonds was away from London, Albyn would hold copies of proclamations for him, but, as Albyn put it in a letter, “yf ther com any esterordinary they shall bee sent to you.” Albyn not only provided printed news but also wrote newsletters to keep his patron au courant when he was in the country. One of his letters contained information about James I’s death and its aftermath, such as the late king’s “most exelent confession of his faith” in which he upheld his devout Protestant-

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ism despite false rumors that had circulated about his religious opinions. Albyn then described how Charles had displayed the “piety of a sonne in a trew sorrow” for his gravely ill father by, among other things, choosing John Donne to preach on the Sunday following the king’s death.112 the credibility and dissemination of news Simonds’s sources for the news were numerous, and he fully understood that their credibility varied. Frequently no particular source was cited, as in this diary entry: “Newes was growen with the cameleon to varye everye day into a new shape, for the peace in France which I heard of before, was now cleane dasht” (November 8, 1622).113 He did, however, occasionally mention the names of some of his informants. For example, on July 11, 1623, he noted that his brother-in-law, Sir William Ellyott, arrived in the evening and “tolde us much newes.”114 Francis Boldero, who would the next month back him up in the quarrel with Scudamore, had been on board the English ships that brought Prince Charles back from Spain in October 1623. On October 21, Boldero visited Simonds in London and told him that he thought “the match” of the prince and the infanta “would not goe forwarde and the papists themselves weere in a desperate despaire about it.”115 When Simonds reworked his September 11 entry, he included vivid details of the prince’s fraught departure from Spain and journey home that he probably learned from Boldero. These included a description of the entourage of Spaniards sent to accompany the prince to Santander as “a rout of onion breath rascalls.” Also, the marquess of Buckingham’s “bumme made buttons” when he was stranded on the shore while a sudden storm endangered Charles’s life as he was rowed toward his ship on a barge.116 One of Simonds’s sources for what went on in the Parliament of 1624 was an MP, Sir Thomas Holland. Holland told him that “our most hopefull Prince Charles” said while talking to various lords in the Painted Chamber that “the King his father had been long in drawing his sworde and would bee long ere hee put it upp againe” now that the attempt to achieve his goals by diplomacy had failed.117 Simonds also had intelligence from across the English Channel. William Beeston wrote to him from the Dutch army’s camp at Rosendael during its attempt to raise the Spanish siege of Breda late in 1624. Beeston, a fellow of St. John’s, had been tutor to James Wriothesley, one of Simonds’s best friends at Cambridge. James, the eldest son of the earl of Southampton, was with his father commanding English troops in the Netherlands late in 1624. Beeston must have been with them when he reported to Simonds on November 20, 1624, that their troops “lay intrenched for 3 weekes close by ye enimy.” Beeston found the caution of the Dutch leader, Prince Maurice of Nas-

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sau, so excessive that his activities “did rather amuse ye enimy yn molest him.”118 Beeston had spent time at Busbridge with Simonds’s sister and her husband and visited Simonds several times in London in 1623. Their intimacy is indicated in Beeston’s closing remarks in a letter he wrote from Cleve in September. He sent his respects to Simonds’s brother Ellyott and his wife, to his sisters Grace, Marie, and Betty, and to his brother “little Capteyn Dicke.” At this time, Richard D’Ewes was eight years old.119 the spanish marriage Simonds’s friends and relations living away from London depended on him for news, and he tried not to disappoint them. The volume of his outgoing correspondence and the news it contained would increase significantly after his marriage and departure from his life as a barrister in 1626. Nevertheless, he collected news eagerly despite his busy schedule at the Middle Temple, and there are a few examples of his use of it in letters to friends before his marriage. In June 1623, for example, John Jefferay, in one of his Latin letters from Cambridge, alluded to Simonds’s access to news. He praised his young friend for the way that, despite his residence in “the theatre of idleness, pleasures and ambition” that was London, he had not fallen victim to “that whirlwind of epidemic insanity” but rather had kept himself “collected and balanced” in the midst of it. Yet having lauded Simonds for managing to keep his eye on “the highest things . . . with regard to the Church and the Republic,” Jefferay toward the end of his letter asked that “if you should have anything more happily from transmarine parts, candid as you are, impart it to us.”120 Among D’Ewes’s Latin responses to Jefferay is one he wrote on October 30, 1623, to report that, after the departure of the hated Spanish ambassador Gondomar, Philip IV had sent two successors, Don Carlos Coloma and Juan de Mendoza, the marquis of Ynojosa. Simonds described the latter as “the offspring, I opine, of that pernicious Mendoza” who had represented Spain at Queen Elizabeth’s court and proved himself “a plotter and a betrayer.”121 On the preceding July 20, a Sunday, James I had in the presence of these ambassadors and a large crowd of courtiers and other observers, solemnly sworn an oath to uphold the articles in the treaty with Spain that was expected to clear the way for the marriage of Prince Charles and the Infanta Maria. Ever since it had first been bruited, Simonds and his friends had hoped that the negotiation would fail. They had been aghast when, in January, Prince Charles and the favorite, George Villiers, marquess of Buckingham, undertook their extraordinary journey to Spain, where they expected to bring the marriage negotiations to fruition. Simonds had followed the news that trickled back from Madrid with intense foreboding,

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and “now everye mans mouth,” he wrote in his diary on July 17, “was full of discourse of the articles concluded betweene Spaine and us, and everye mans heart of feare of an ensuing toleration.”122 The July 20 oath ceremony seemed to confirm their worst fears, for the articles made promises that they believed would end in the overthrow of the Protestant religion and the subjection of England to the Habsburgs. Soon after the ceremony, he mentioned it and its eager reception by English Catholics along with other news in a letter to his father at Stowlangtoft late in the month. Paul jocularly responded that although he and Simonds’s “greatbellied Sister” enjoyed reading it, “the closeness of the lines” and “the fulness of the letter doe both conspire to make me vse a secretary.”123 On Saturday July 19, 1623, Simonds had gone down to Whitehall to survey the preparations for the ceremony that would occur the next day. He “saw the rich bason and ewre” that Henry VII purchased and “the cupp of one entire agate” that the constable of Castile gave to Henry, as well as “all the rest of the ancient and rich plate of the crowne” that was set out for use in the feast that would follow the oath ceremony on the next day.124 Simonds did not attend the ceremony itself, nor did he hesitate to voice his disapproval of the use of “this blessed Lordes day that should have been spent in Gods service” in “pomp at Court” and “iollitye and feasting.” It made Sabbath-breakers of thousands of Londoners, and even he admitted that discussion of it captured some of the time he normally would have devoted to “the service of my good God.” Yet the avid newsmonger in Simonds did not prevent him from thoroughly interrogating friends who had observed the event. He even went so far as to compose an elaborate twenty-three hundred word account of it that soon circulated as a “separate.” His July 20 diary entry reads: “I wrote a discourse of it at large, which went abroad in manye mens hands, under the name of Philanax Patroleinos, which signifieth a lover of the King and a pitier or pitiing his Countrye, as it well needed during these feares and troubles.”125 Philanax’s detailed description of the oath-taking in the royal chapel was written with a pen dipped in acid: “It was a pittie to see the Courte soe thronged and to be suspected the Churches weere emptie.” Sadly, the “whole Courte with Martha” was “cumbred about many thinges,” and it was fortunate for them that Simonds and others “with Mary chose the better parte to doe the worke of that daye” by praying for those who were misspending their time.126 This somber and critical mood carried over into Philanax’s reportage about the appearance of many of the participants. The two Spanish ambassadors dressed similarly, their clothing “rather gorgious in shew then rich in substance, beinge but of Tynsell stufes,” and their attendants looked as

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though they “had bene Tormentores in the inquisition house, the sinke of all Crueltie and Atheisme.” His view of James’s courtiers was more charitable but hardly admiring: “ffor our Courte, . . . there were noe more of the Nobillitie, then either ther being in Towne, or late Creacions or vndeserved prefermentes did oblige and necessitat to be there.” The ceremony began when Sir George Calvert, the secretary of state, started reading the articles out loud, “giving occasion of suspition to some that he sawe more, then all men suspected, by reason of his shakinge hande and submisse voice at first as though he feared to goe on.” However, after his uneasy beginning, Calvert’s voice grew stronger. Next Lancelot Andrewes, the bishop of Winchester, administered the oath, after which everyone moved into the banqueting house. Simonds, ever careful about social rank and protocol, listed the courtiers who “busied to make all Cheare for the greate ones” on the contents of “twoe mightie Cupbordes of Riche and Massye Plate.” By “cheare” he meant the food and drink, and his sources found it disappointing. The earl of Carlisle “tooke much paines to haue that litle meate there was, well served vpp,” leading to the conclusion that “the service was beyonde the Cheere materiam superabet opus.” Ovid’s epigram (“the workmanship was better than the subject matter”) was one of several Latin tags Simonds inserted into his essay, which he concluded by reporting that all was over by two in the afternoon, after which the Spaniards went back to their quarters in Holborn. Holborn was “the only merrie streete of soe spatious a Cittie” because the “weaker Judgmentes” among the Londoners shouted their dissatisfaction at the prospect of the Spanish marriage raucously while “the wyser . . . hoped well, but feared more.” Meanwhile Simonds clung to his confidence that “the goodnes of soe iust and mercifull a God: in whose hands is the heartes of Kinges, to turn them which waye he listeth” would eventually prevail.127 Jaundiced though his account of the ceremony was, Simonds did not repeat the description of Ynojosa that he had put in his diary at the time of the marquis’s arrival in June: “hee was a man of small port or grace in his carriage and butt of a middle stature, and worst of all hee was when hee spake, for his nose had been eaten away with whooring, and some of his upper lipp, soe that hee was beholding to Corke and like instruments to helpe his speech.”128 Although Simonds missed the oath ceremony in 1623 because it occurred on a sabbath, he often attended significant events at Westminster and elsewhere on other days of the week. By November 1623 it was apparent that Prince Charles and Buckingham were heading for a confrontation with Spain, and the Spanish ambassadors had worn out their welcome. Still, the formalities had to be observed. On the evening of November 18,

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Simonds, “with amutch adoe” managed to observe an elaborate banquet staged by Buckingham at his residence, York House. James had elevated Buckingham to a dukedom the preceding May, the first nonroyal duke since the execution of the duke of Norfolk in 1572. Simonds saw the favorite, the king, Prince Charles, and two of the Spanish ambassadors dine, and he considered that “the cheare was admirable, the verye napkins printed and sett like ruffs.” A masque that celebrated Charles’s return followed, but Simonds and many others did not get to see it. Before it began the prince acted as “the whisler” (that is, bouncer) and “himselfe went about and putt men out.” The next morning Mendoza and his daughter visited James and Charles, and it was thought that the Spaniard was preparing to take his leave because he could see that there were “two things” moving forward that “the Spaniards like not, a parliament shortlye to bee had and the restoring of the Palatinate.”129 Simonds again observed the royal court at eight on the evening of June 30, 1625. The French princess Henrietta Maria, who had married Charles I earlier by proxy in Paris, arrived at Dover and was met by her husband on June 12. The newlyweds dined at Whitehall on June 30, and Simonds said that he went there “purposelie to see the Queene.” His interest may have owed something to his own quest for a bride during this period. His account makes it clear that he found her very attractive indeed. He described her as “a most absolute delicate Ladie.” Her eyes were “radiant and sparkling, . . . her deportment amongst her women was so sweete & humble, . . . as I could not abstain from diuers deepe fetched sighs to consider that shee wanted [lacked] the knowledge of the true religion.”130 His sympathy for the young Catholic queen lasted for a while at least. When Charles angrily dismissed her French servants a year later, Simonds reported the incident in a letter to his Suffolk friend, Sir Martin Stuteville: “For newes the french remooved, the sweet Queene immoderatelie perplexed makes mee as sadd for the latter as ioyfull for the first.”131 a new king Although Charles I became king when his father died on March 27, 1625, his coronation ceremony was delayed. Bubonic plague raged in London, forcing the first Parliament of the new reign to move to Oxford in August. The coronation did not occur until Thursday, February 2, 1626, and Simonds suspected that the decision to perform it privately owed more to the desire to save money than to fear of contagion. Nevertheless, he managed to attend and just two days later wrote from his chamber in the Middle Temple a detailed and almost breathless account to Stuteville of what he had seen of “the actions & passions of this late great Thursday.”

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Simonds said that he had had “the happines to bee a spectator” when “our Imperiall soveraigne, invested in his marble chaire ascended to his roiall throne.” Then engaged with Cotton in Robert de Vere’s battle for the Oxford earldom, Simonds reported that he had been invited to Cotton’s house to view the young king’s arrival. The plan was that Charles would use the stairs up from the Thames that lay below Cotton’s garden on his way to the ceremony. The earl marshal, Thomas Howard, earl of Arundel, had directed that carpets cover the place where the king’s barge would stop. Cotton stood ready to hand Charles “a booke of Athelstans being the fower Evangelists in Latin” upon which English kings had taken their oaths for hundreds of years. From there he, Buckingham, and others in their party were to go to Westminster Hall to don their robes and carry out preliminary ceremonies before proceeding to the abbey for the coronation itself. Cotton and his guests were to be disappointed, for Charles and Buckingham instead were rowed farther to “the Parliament staires.” In this letter, Simonds attributed the change of plan to a snub toward Cotton from Buckingham, but by the time he wrote his autobiography he was uncertain whether the slight had been aimed at Cotton or Arundel. Simonds then went to the hall and watched nearby when Charles climbed some stairs to a stage. As he did so Buckingham extended his hand in assistance, and Simonds saw Charles reject the help and “with a smiling countenance” tell his friend that “I haue as much neede to helpe yow as yow to assist mee. I dare say hee meant it plainlie, yet searching braines might pick much from it.”132 After the presentation of orb, sword, scepter, and other regalia, the royal party proceeded to the abbey for the coronation. At this point, Simonds, having earlier reconnoitered and found the doors to the church guarded, assumed that he would have to return to his chamber in the Middle Temple. Nevertheless, he went there and happened upon a door “guarded by one & thronged at by few.” The guard, apparently instructed by his “gentler thoughts,” made no objection to Simonds’s entrance. “Being in I instantlie setled myselfe at the stage on which stoode the roiall seate. My expectation was soon answeered wth his Majesties approach.” The king, “presenting himselfe bareheaded to the people,” then listened as Archbishop Abbot began the ceremony. Simonds described the rest of the event—sermon, litany, coronation, unction, communion—in awed and admiring terms. He concluded by stating that at the end the king, in “purple robes,” mounted the “stage and throne,” announced a “free pardon” that was greeted with “great acclamation,” and “tooke homage of all the Peeres; they putting ther hands into his & being kissed by him did him both homage & fealtie.” The respectful description of the coronation that Simonds wrote for Stuteville contained a mention of the queen’s ab-

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sence but no criticism of it. He wrote simply that “the queene was neither crowned nor at the Church.”133 It is probable that he did not yet know that Henrietta Maria had flatly refused to participate because she would not attend any ceremony over which Protestant clergymen presided, bitterly disappointing her husband not only for her unwillingness to be crowned but even to be present as a spectator. When Charles I was crowned, Simonds still had high hopes that the king would act on his intention to help his brother-in-law regain the Palatinate and otherwise rule wisely and well. However, by the time he wrote his autobiography, he had come to a very different opinion of Charles I. In 1638, he followed his quotation of the dialogue between the king and the duke in Westminster Hall as follows: “which speech I the rather thought vpon when the saied Duke being questioned in the Parliament ensuing for his life, the King to preuent his further danger made an abortiue dissolution of that great assemblie” on June 15, 1626.134 This remark underscores the danger that lies in treating the autobiography as a reliable guide to Simonds’s thinking during the 1620s. Until late in that decade, he was in fact highly critical of James I and optimistic about Charles. As we have seen, he had been appalled by James’s plan to marry Charles to the Spanish infanta. For example, in his cipher diary entry for January 2, 1622, he mentioned that he had talked with visiting friends about “the danger of the Spanish match.” In the same entry he displayed anger about James’s imprisonment of Sir Edward Coke, “and alsoe for [James’s] intention to breake upp the parliament to the great discontent of all his truly religious and loyall subjects.”135 Five days later he wrote a catty description of an incident at court in which James refused to eat until Buckingham abandoned his tennis game and attended him instead. When the marquess arrived, James “fell upon his necke.” Six days later, Simonds wrote that James’s rumored intention to dismiss the Parliament demonstrated that the king was “moore unjust towards the parliament then ever any king had done.”136 On January 10, he noted that the king had nearly drowned after he fell off his horse and into a pond at Theobalds; some had “imputed” this accident to “the sudden breach of the parliament, others to his coolenes in religion, but certainly it was a warning from God unto him and I beseech him to sanctify it.” On January 15, he entered an account of a lengthy conversation with Mr. Masters. They concluded that James’s “actions did tend to an absolute monarchye and for his riches twas thought that hee shared with the Marquess [of Buckingham] and had much treasure liing by him.”137 On August 29, 1622, Simonds spoke with a visiting friend from Cambridge about the sin of sodomy, its frequency in the “wicked cittye” of London, and the danger

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that God would requite it with some fearful punishment, “especially it being as wee had probable cause to feare, a sinne in the prince as well as the people.” This entry also included a report that a Frenchman “whoe had buggered a knights sonne” was facing punishment by the London recorder in the Guild Hall when Chief Justice Montague (Coke’s successor) intervened at the king’s behest (“as twas thought”) to shield him.138 On January 11, 1623, Simonds described an incident at Lincoln’s Inn in which James’s “base and cowardly nature easilye appeared.”139 The other side of the coin of his hostility to the Spanish marriage was, of course, James’s failure to offer meaningful assistance to the Elector Palatine and his wife. In February 1623, D’Ewes referred to James as an “unnatural father” for his failure to help his daughter and her husband.140 Given this barrage of blistering remarks about James in the cipher diary from 1622 to 1624, it comes as a surprise to read Simonds’s account of the public reaction to the death of the first Stuart king in his autobiography. He expressed amazement that, after the late king’s burial, all men generallie sleight and disregard the loss of soe milde & gentle a Prince, . . . For though it cannot bee denied but that hee had his vices & deuiations, & that the true Church of God was welleneare ruined in Germanie, whilst hee sate still & looked on, yet if wee consider his vertues & learning . . . his care to maintaine the doctrine of the Church of England pure & sound, his opposicion against James Arminius Conradus Vorstius & other blasphemous Anabaptists & his augmenting the liberties of the English rather then oppressing them by anie vnlimited or illegall taxes . . . wee cannot but acknowledge that his death deserued moore sorrow & condolement from his subiects then it found.141

This statement, written about twelve years later, was a lament about how much worse things had become under Charles I so far as Simonds was concerned. The “vnlimited or illegall taxes” such as ship money that James had not imposed had been levied vigorously by his son and heir. It is, however, significant, that in this summary of James’s reign, Simonds showed much more concern about “the true Church of God” at home and abroad than about taxes. He faulted James for his failure first to defend and then to recover his son-in-law Frederick’s domains, but in retrospect he realized that what was from his point of view the Church of England’s declension had begun after James’s death. Upset though he had been by James’s rough handling of the Parliament of 1621, the outcome of the 1624 Parliament was more to his liking. Over a decade’s experience with Charles I’s faults led Simonds to revise his opinion of James I. a plethora of parliaments Pride of place in the news that Simonds gathered and transmitted went to the monarchs, their privy councillors, and other prominent aristocrats

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and diplomats at the royal court. They were onstage daily, whereas parliaments met intermittently. During his six years at the Middle Temple, parliamentary sessions totaled only fifty-eight weeks. But when a Parliament was in session, he followed its work with intense interest. No Parliament had convened since the failed one of 1614, and Simonds shared the high expectations that many of his countrymen had for the Parliament of 1621. When he observed King James’s passage to Westminster for the opening of this Parliament, he found it “somewhat remarkable” that whereas James’s “hastie & passionate custome” was to shout foulmouthed imprecations toward the people who lined the streets to see him, on this occasion he spoke “often & lovinglie” to them, saying, “God blesse yee God blesse yee.” He also listened to the king’s speech and thought it “pithie & elegant” in its pledges for the reform of monopolies, support for the Elector Palatine, and avoidance of the Spanish marriage for Prince Charles unless it had parliamentary approval.142 Shortly before its second session opened in November 1621, he said in a letter to a friend that “much forraigne newes flyes” around, most of it subject to “vncertaintye, yett certainlye great hope is conceaved of our ensuing parliament, God grant the end may prooue it.”143 The king’s proclamation dismissing this Parliament on January 9, 1622, was an act, Simonds noted his cipher diary, “against which the whole land murmured,” and the reasons “gave little satisfaction to any and therfore, if the English had not altogether lost ther spirits, some rebellion was expected.” On this day, the king left town for one of his hunting lodges, and “it was reported that hee thought all his subjects would not give five pound for his life.” With due caution about such a report, Simonds wrote that “of the truth of this I cannot affirme.”144 His angry assertion that James’s treatment of this assembly showed him to have been “moore unjust” toward Parliament than any of his predecessors was quoted above. When writs were issued in January for the election of members of the House of Commons for the Parliament of 1624, Simonds wrote that, although busy with his “ordinarie studies,” he felt a desire to “bee a burgess of this Parliament, but it vanished to some discomfort in mee.”145 This was the first and the last mention of such an urge on his part until 1640. Nevertheless, he closely followed its deliberations and entered many brief notes about them in his cipher diary. His brother-in-law, Sir William Ellyott, and his friend William Beeston were burgesses, and he learned much about what happened in the House of Commons from them. These entries would certainly have been fuller had he not obtained what he called a “perfect iournal of this Parliament,” which meant that he had no need to insert all the information he had into his diary.146 In his autobiography, he

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wrote that he spent most of October 1625 at Kediton with Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston. Together, they “laboured on the weeke daies” so that Barnardiston could “frame a Journall of the last unfortunate and successles Parliament in which hee had been a Burgesse.”147 Sir Nathaniel, therefore, was surely the source of Simonds’s “perfect iournall” of the 1624 Parliament. On February 24, when the Parliament was not yet a week old, he noted that Prince Charles and the duke of Buckingham told the members about “how the King was abused by the Spaniards and they deluded in Spaine” about the marriage to the Spanish infanta. “But because I have these speeches at large by mee and the iournall of this parliament, I deferr to speake anye moore of them.” On the next day, he noted the prevalence of rumors that the Spanish fleet was nearby and that English ships had been captured in Spain. With due skepticism, he added that such reports always circulated when a Parliament met in order to soften its members up to grant revenue to the king, “but else I conceive this was but idle, for nothing came of it.”148 On March 1, he expressed satisfaction that “the twoe howses of Parliament went on courageouslie, agreeing to advise the king to breake off the twoe treaties with Spaine, both of the match and of the Palatinate.” Two days later he recorded news that in Parliament “new things weere still discovered concerning the king of Spaines evill dealings with the Prince during his being ther.” On March 4, Simonds wrote about the duke of Buckingham’s efforts in the Parliament to defend himself by placing blame on the conduct of James I’s ambassador in Madrid, John Digby, earl of Bristol. From this point on, his cipher diary shows him to have been receiving news about what had happened in Parliament almost daily.149 His father had left to spend the Lent vacation at Busbridge, and on March 9, Simonds wrote to him there to report that the Parliament had taken up no new business “since your departure.” But it continued “the great begunn busines” of pressing the king to declare war on Spain.150 His next letter to Paul, on March 23, related that the Parliament had voted to grant the king taxes (“3 subsidies 3 fifteenes”), but there was a condition: “if the K. declare himselfe,” meaning commit himself to war against Spain.151 Unfortunately, the cipher diary ends on April 20, but his remarks in his autobiography demonstrate that he monitored its proceedings until its dismissal late in May. There, he opined that as the end neared, the MPs “went forward with small courage” and that at its dissolution many showed “the greife of ther hearts by ther sadde countenances.”152 A year before the end of this Parliament, Simonds had, in his cipher diary, expressed thanks to God that England “had enioyed soe long the holye gospell and this blessed peace” that enabled him to sustain his “daylie studie and private devotion, without trouble, without hinderance.” But

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at the same moment he felt that God was warning him “to pray for and to arme my selfe for preparation against worser times” that lay ahead.153 Yet as late as January 1626, the troubles he feared had not yet fully materialized. King James’s last Parliament had at least laid some groundwork for the war against Spain that he and his friends hoped would lead to the Palatinate’s recovery. The miserable failure of the force led by the mercenary soldier Count Ernst Mansfeld that the Parliament funded in 1624 had been a shock. Nevertheless, Charles I and the duke of Buckingham, young and vigorous men angered by their humiliation in Madrid, appeared at the outset of the new reign zealous about pursuing the Protestant cause. But more military failures and the fierce quarrels that blighted Charles’s early parliaments soon demonstrated that the “worser times” were indeed setting in. The Parliament of 1625 began on June 18 and ended on August 12 when Charles dismissed it after members tried to force the dismissal of the duke of Buckingham. Simonds paid relatively little attention to it except to regret that the king’s first Parliament, which “should haue been an happie occasion & meanes to haue vnited & setled the affection of Prince & people in a firme concord & correspondence,” had achieved nothing. Its dissolution occurred “suddenlie and vnexpectedlie . . . to the great greife of all good subjects that loued true Religion ther King & the Commonwealth.” Doubtless, he and many others were distracted by the plague epidemic that swept London that summer. On July 7, he and his father left London for Stow Hall to get away from it, and other family members had gone there over a fortnight earlier.154 A new Parliament met on February 6, 1626, just four days after the coronation ceremony into which Simonds had sneaked, and this time he was in London throughout its five-month session, remaining there during the Lent vacation instead of going to Suffolk. Early on, he reported to Sir Martin Stuteville that “the Parliament sits harde yet little matter of moment; yow may guesse at it, when one bill for scandalous ministers tooke vpp I thinke two daies.”155 This letter must have received praise from his friends at Dalham because in the next one, he wrote that had he known that “my last lines should haue been soe much respected by yow, or at all seen by others veiw, I would not haue suffered my hastie penn” to leave “those weakenesses” it contained. He reported on the debates in the House of Lords about the earl of Oxford’s title (an issue that he and Sir Robert Cotton had labored over, as indicated above). That Stuteville and others in the country were following this matter is indicated by Simonds’s request in a postscript that when Sir Martin regained “the Oxford title” (presumably the document on the case that Simonds and Sir Robert Cotton had composed from Sir William Spring, he would pass it on to Joseph Mede

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in Cambridge “& desire him from mee to lend it to Mr Beeston of St Johns & to John Scott of Cambridge.” He also wrote about the imprisonment of the earl of Arundel on what many regarded as trumped up charges, the purpose being to remove an enemy of the duke of Buckingham from the scene. As Simonds put it, “the vpper howse conceiving this storme to haue fallen by the Dukes meanes” was moving to press for Arundel’s release.156 As the Parliament of 1626 continued, the wind of opposition to Buckingham approached gale force, and Simonds made sure that his friends got the whole story. “I hope you cannot sitt drie in this deluge of portentous newes,” Simonds wrote early in May to Sir Martin. “I had rather,” he continued, “see the Dukes reformation then ruine, yet rather his then the weale publicks.”157 Then, in a postscript written slightly later, he added that John Digby, the earl of Bristol, had “moderatelie well satisfied the howse [of lords], the Duke still sitting ther although accused of the same Treason Bristoll was.” He included a copy of “Bristols articles against the Duke” and promised that the articles being generated in the lower house against Buckingham would soon follow, “some 15 sheetes of paper.” He also asked Sir Martin to send the articles to Sir William Spring, “if yow thinke hee hath them not alreadie.” The time Simonds used to add this information was available because Sir Martin had sent a servant with his response to an earlier letter. This is suggested by the fact that Simonds added yet a further postscript that began: “if your mans stay continue much longer I feare my Letter will loose that title, & become a curranto.” A “coranto” was the contemporary term for a printed digest of news. He followed this comment with a list of the eight members of the House of Commons who transmitted the charges of impeachment against Buckingham to the upper house, “the Duke sitting ther outfacing his accusors . . . to the high indignation of the Commons.”158 One of the charges was that Buckingham had administered a poison to James I in his last illness that had caused his death. The high drama continued, and Simonds wrote: I cannot hold; this great thursday makes mee add all this private newes which I desire yow to keepe to your selfe as your owne by separating this halfe sheete & burning itt or concealing it though ther bee nothing in it vnlawfull or vnfitt to be saied. The King was this morning in the vpper howse & ther complained of Sir John Elliot for comparing the Duke to Sejanus in which hee saied implicitelie hee must intend him for Tiberius: short after about eleven of the clocke hee sent both him & Sir Dudlye Diggs to the Tower.159

We can only speculate about how this news was received in Suffolk, but when King Charles dismissed the Parliament, Simonds’s recollection of its reception when he wrote his autobiography was straightforward enough: “Infinite almost was the saddnes of each mans heart, & the deiectnes of

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his countenance that trulie loued the Church or commonwealth, at the sudden & abortiue breach of the present Parliament on Thursday, the 15. day of this instant June.”160

The Sermon Gadder Although legal studies, historical research, and political news took up much of his time during his six years at the Middle Temple, the elaboration of Simonds D’Ewes’s spirituality by no means stood still while he engaged himself in these other pursuits. The fullest picture of his piety in a day-today sense emerges from a reading of his 1622–44 cipher diary. Already an energetic sermon gadder and strict sabbatarian, he reveled in the phalanx of preachers available to him in the capital. He spent his Sundays listening to and taking notes on sermons and repeating and discussing them, along with news about relevant political matters, among his friends. As the preceding section of this chapter demonstrated, such discussions often occurred after the evening sermon in the room of the preacher at the Temple Church, Thomas Masters. Simonds regularly heard Masters on Sunday mornings and Thomas Chaffin, the Temple lecturer, in the evening. But in the afternoons he frequently walked to hear preachers throughout London. He ventured out often to hear Josiah Shute at St. Mildred Poultry and Martinus Day at St. Faith’s. Others he heard included William Gouge, Richard Stock, Walter Balcanquhall, Francis White, William Crashaw, Cornelius Burges, Isaac Bargrave, Thomas Goad, George Montaigne, Samuel Purchas, James Ussher, and John Donne. Only occasionally did he enter into the diary information about the subject or contents of what he had heard. One such occasion was January 6, 1622, when the afternoon sermon “preached by Mr. Stocke in Breadstreet” showed “how many come to heare but with little profitt, as allsoe how wonderfully God did bless the practice of such as did strive to bring away anye thing and how wofull ther case was who dayly heard but profited not.”161 Just over a year later, he had a similar experience. In the afternoon, he heard Dr. Francis White (later a bishop) “preach exceeding well” on a knotty problem, the credal statement about the conception of the Virgin Mary. White demonstrated that “the three persons did ioine in the conceiving of him and hee onlye took it upon him, like as if three virgins (as olde Anselme illustrates it) should all ioine in the working of some curious garment, and then one putt it on.”162 For the most part, Simonds liked what he heard in these sermons, although he listened critically. For example, Masters usually spoke “well” in his view, but on one occasion the Temple preacher must have been a bit off form because Simonds adjudged that he did only “moderately well.”163

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At one point in 1623, he went to the royal chapel in hope of a “good sermon” in the morning and was disappointed because “one Doctor Gifforde preached ther but meanely.” Some weeks later, he was even more caustic, having heard “some words” from two different preachers, “but I cannot say directlye betweene them both one sermon.”164 Occasionally, he listened to something that smacked of “pelagianism” in one or another of its manifestations, and he registered his disapproval vigorously. When he visited Cambridge at the end of June in 1622 for the commencement ceremony, he heard William Lucy preach in the University church. Buckingham had made Lucy his chaplain at King James’s behest, and Simonds asserted that his sermon contained “anabaptisme, poperye and almost atheisme.” Yet Lucy was “not at all questioned” about it, a proof that Buckingham’s “shadow was not to bee trodd upon.”165 At the Temple Church on February 22, 1624, Simonds was aghast when he heard “one verie bad sermon savouring of Arminianisme, a verie dangerous heresie, being but refined pelagianisme or rather revised, which was first broached in the Low Cuntries and had now of late spread exceedinglie in Cambridge and in most partes of England.”166 Given his preoccupation with news about the perilous condition of international Calvinism, it comes as no surprise that Simonds delighted in those who spoke against the threat of “popery.” On February 10, 1622, he praised Dr. Sharpe’s “excellent sermon” in the Temple Church for its stories about two famous Catholics, Bishop Stephen Gardiner and Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, who allegedly accepted the truth of Luther’s doctrine of sola fides while refusing to disseminate it publicly because to do so would undermine clerical authority. “Whence appeares,” Simonds opined, “the miserable estate of the popish docters whoe teach against ther owne knowledge.”167 On September 1, 1622, he wrote in his cipher diary that “our sermons begann now to grow famous and Paules Crosse to bee the theater of many passages” (“passages” here meaning significant incidents or events). On that day, a former Jesuit turned Church of England clergyman, Richard Sheldon, argued there that Catholics “had the mark of the beaste in ther foreheads” and “that poperye could not in any possibilitye, morall, divine or royall, settle in this kingdome anymoore, for now the gospell was grounded heere and those that had once forsaken the pope would never come under his yoake againe.” On the previous Sunday, a sermon at Paul’s Cross by a minister named Clayton resulted in his imprisonment. He had talked about a Spanish sheep brought to England during Edward I’s reign “which infected all our sheepe with murraine.” To this “the people cried amen” because they knew he was speaking against the proposed Spanish marriage for Prince Charles.

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In this same entry, Simonds mentioned that Dr. John Everard, who not long before preached a sermon in which he criticized the freeing of Roman Catholic priests in preparation for the Spanish marriage, was also in jail for his words. Additionally, Samuel Ward, the minister at Ipswich in Suffolk, had published an engraving that represented the Gunpowder Plot and the pope, his cardinals, and King Philip III of Spain at a meeting presided over by the devil. Count Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, complained of the engraving, and Ward was immured in the Fleet prison. Simonds’s laconic comment was that Ward was “againe in trouble.”168 Simonds exulted when he learned of the content of the Palm Sunday sermon preached by Archbishop Abbot in 1624. Abbot called for increased measures against Catholic recusancy, and Simonds commended him for his “extraordinarie boldnes and plaines,” which “much comforted all his honest hearted hearers.”169 In between the sermons on the Lord’s Day, Simonds spent most of the day in what he called “divine studyes,” meaning theological and devotional reading, meditation, and prayer. On September 8, 1622, he used the time between sermons to read in the works of Bishop Jewel, the famous apologist for the Elizabethan church. After hearing Paul Micklethwaite’s sermon on April 20, 1623, he “spent the afternoone writing out” the notes he had taken. After hearing two sermons on July 6, 1623, he visited Mr. Masters and recorded that “wee read some exceeding good expositions” on Luke 16:9. Present that evening was “one Mr Lapthorne a verye religious minister” who convinced Simonds that the use of the phrase “IN TRUTH was not in a good mans speech.”170 In his autobiography, he noted that on December 12, 1624, he finished reading the Bible and that his practice was to read some part of it every day and “soe read ouer the most vsefull partes & bookes of it often.”171 During the vacations between terms (usually at Stowlangtoft or in Surrey at his sister and brother-in-law’s house), the family attended the morning sermon and an afternoon lecture if there was one. On a cold and snowy January 19, 1623, for example, he rode his horse to the church in Busbridge (his father and brother-in-law having stayed home), and the entire family “spent the residue of the sabboath in religious exercises fitting the day.” By the following Sunday, he was back in London and heard his usual three sermons.172 He remained insistent about the danger of engaging in worldly matters on the sabbath. When King James received a delegation from Parliament that brought him news of a willingness to supply funds for a war against Spain on Sunday, March 14, 1624, the royal answer was most unsatisfactory to the MPs. This led Simonds to reiterate that “God seldome giveth a blessing when this day is thus imployed about our owne occasions.”173

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Another feature of Simonds’s religious practice in these years was the care with which he prepared for the monthly communion. His preparation usually consisted of spending additional time in prayer and study on the Saturday before the Eucharist. For example, when at Busbridge in March and April 1622, he alternated his weekday reading between legal and historical treatises and Sir Phillip Sidney’s Arcadia. The latter he perused “with great delight, the stile of it being most sweete and excellent.” On April 20, the Saturday before Easter, he read Coke’s reports in the morning but then turned to prepare himself “to bee a partaker of the holye communion, the better to remember Christs resurrection, . . . to bee mindful of his resurrection to righteousness.” On the next morning, to his “exceeding greefe,” his father decided not to receive communion, and Simonds reluctantly followed suit while writing in his diary: “I hope my good God did accept the will for the deed and soe I desired to make upp the day as if I had receaved.”174 His preparation did not, however, consist entirely of study, because he always wanted to be in a fit state morally and spiritually for the sacrament. When he felt that he had failed in some way, he was downcast. On November 24, 1622, he wrote that, although “a partaker” of “a blessed communion,” he confessed “with greife” his “own unworthiness.”175 Occasionally, he received the sacrament but then failed in some way to perform the duties that should have occupied the rest of the day. On Easter Sunday in 1623, he wrote “oh! this wicked flesh of ours, neither spent I the day nor receaved I that, soe purelye and conscionablye as I desired and yett, alas, my hope in all was that my good God would accept the will for the deed and bee mercifull in all, and in his good time enable mee for moore absolute and perfect strength.”176 One of the hindrances Simonds struggled against was anger toward others, such as “a foolish division” about a moot that occurred on July 30, 1623. Three days later he happened to sup with “that faction . . . whose violent and rash proceedings” about the moot had angered him and was “exceedinglye provoked by the base speeches of one of them.” Because the next day was a communion Sunday, he “was greived to have anye the least occasion of dissension.” Mr. Masters, during their Saturday evening colloquy, directed his attention to the prophet Isaiah’s statement that “all our workes [that is] all our afflictions . . . agree for our peace.” This counsel led Simonds to forgive the offender “without anye satisfaction” rather than lose “the comfort of this holye supper of the Lorde.” Having gone that far, he realized that God himself had arranged the quarrel as a way of humbling Simonds for having become overly proud of his brand-new status as a barrister. He suspected that his reputation had suffered as a result even among his friends. “My comforte,” he concluded, was that “God

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could easilye restore my respect, if I could amend my errors.” On the next day, he gratefully “receaved much comfort by this holy sacrament” in the morning and enlightenment by hearing Dr. Day preach “exceeding well in the afternoone” against the worshipping of saints.177 the stowlangtoft pulpit When his Cambridge friends John Jefferay and Paul Micklethwaite and his tutor Richard Holdsworth came to town to preach, Simonds eagerly attended. He heard Holdsworth’s Good Friday sermon at St. Paul’s Cross in 1623 and characterized it as “elaborate and honest,” both terms of high praise in his lexicon. He also heard Holdsworth preach twice in London in March 1628.178 On April 20, Simonds wrote that Micklethwaite “made the repetition sermons this sunday . . . and indeed hee performed it exceeding well, expressing a great deale both of sufficiencie and honestie; hee was neare 5 howres long for hee repeated three sermons at the Spittle, and that at the Crosse on good friday and lastlye the fift sermon was his owne.”179 When Masters died in 1628, Micklethwaite succeeded him as Master of the Temple.180 Simonds did more for his Cambridge friends than merely write them Latin letters and attend their sermons. He also worked to assist their careers. He had been at Cambridge not quite a month when, in June 1618, he wrote to the wealthy and powerful Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston to praise several of his friends. In the annual commencement, they had “kept ther acts with great creditt & doe commence this year Batchlors of Divinitye.”181 One of those he named was Micklethwaite. Long established Suffolk country gentlemen like Barnardiston had considerable influence when it came to ecclesiastical patronage, and even a relative newcomer like Paul D’Ewes had a patronal role to play at Stowlangtoft and Lavenham where he owned the manors and the advowsons (the right to nominate candidates to fill vacancies for clerical positions) that went with them. The rector of the lovely church of St. George Stowlangtoft when Paul bought the manor in 1614 was James Wallis. Wallis had been the incumbent since 1580, and by 1623 his health was failing. In a July 29 letter to Simonds, Paul said that Wallis was “a very weake man. I may safely pray god to strengthen him in the inward man who hath strengthned diverse in his life time. His outside decayes much speech hearing memory and senses.”182 Paul was back in London when he received a letter that William Smith, a neighboring cleric in Suffolk, wrote on All Saints Day (December 1). Smith reported that Wallis had died the night before. Smith, begging pardon lest he might be thought “ouerbold,” nevertheless requested that he be considered for the new vacancy if Paul’s “first intentions” for it “be not accomplished.”183

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Fig. 2.1. The church of St. George, Stowlangtoft (built ca. 1370–1420). Photo by J. Sears McGee.

Thus commenced what proved to be a complicated struggle for the rectorship of St. George Stowlangtoft. On March 9, 1624, writing from the Middle Temple, Simonds was clearly up to his elbows in it. He wrote urging his father to remain “firme for Mr Mickletwaite, humblye desiring yow as yow doe giue mee power to offer it freelye soe yow wilbee pleased not to qualifye it with anye collaterall conditions.” 184 Evidence that Simonds had been given a leading role to play in this drama appears in a letter from a nearby clergyman who wrote to urge him to bestow the advowson upon a “very well qualified” master of arts who was a “near kinsman” of the writer, and he offered a bribe of “two hundred angels” [£100] for the favor. Simonds responded in high dudgeon: although he had been “somewhat inclinable” to the man initially, he was “sorry to see a man of your coat make such” a simoniacal suggestion; moreover, it was “not the way to get preferment from honest men.”185 During the ensuing Easter vacation, Micklethwaite wrote to Paul to decline the offer of the benefice. This was probably because Paul, who delighted in driving hard

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bargains, had despite his son’s urging held out for conditions that cooled Micklethwaite’s ardor for the place. Simonds, knowing that his father was in Surrey and would not receive Micklethwaite’s letter until he returned to London, wrote to him there with the news of his friend’s decision. Disappointed but resilient, Simonds quickly inserted a new name into the game and thereby demonstrated his increasing mastery of its rules and conventions. “I will speake & speake butt this once,” he wrote, “& withall as you have given mee power to nominate soe I will add my humble entreatye to yow to present the man I shall now name.” This was “my loving & Academicke comfortable acquaintance: would yow seeke til you find a man, would you stay til yow see a man every way accomplisht & fitt,” Simonds punningly wrote, finally inserting the name of one Edward Tilman. Simonds went on to say that only what he called his “blind forgetfulnes” had made him put forward the name of Micklethwaite when actually he should have remembered that it was Tilman “whome this Ladye day at Pauls crosse made famouse heere & fitt to bee fullye esteemed every wheere.” Simonds went on to heap up testimonials from his own tutor, the renowned Richard Holdsworth, their much respected preacher friend Abraham Gibson, and even Nicholas Felton, “that divine & blessed bishopp of Elye,” admired “this mans worke.””186 Meanwhile Tilman played his part to perfection, probably counseled in it by his friend. When Tilman wrote to Paul in London on June 2, he began not only by thanking his potential patron for his letters but also by praising their prose style. For himself he could not, he told Paul, “reach so sweete a straine” in his writing, but was very pleased to have “such a patterne to imitate.” On a more practical note, he added that he had “taken a view of the house, and send you heere a copie of the severall dilapidations.” During his visit, Wallis’s widow had found the list excessive, but Tilman averred that it was “in her power to make good all her selfe.” In any case, he promised to “bee whollie ruled” by Paul’s advice in such matters.187 Just a week later, Tilman wrote again and characterized Paul’s letters as “more pleasant then Dorique Musiq as they evidence your good affection towards mee.”188 Blown over by such billows of rhetoric and clouds of witnesses, Paul yielded to the wishes of his twenty-two-year-old son, and Tilman became the rector of St. George, Stowlangtoft. the (almost) complete puritan By midsummer 1624, it might seem that Simonds D’Ewes had long been an exemplary Puritan. As we have seen, he became an avid notetaker at sermons while still a schoolboy, read the Bible thoroughly and theological and devotional works extensively, heard as a university stu-

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dent lectures by leading Calvinist divines, regularly attended the “acts” (theological disputations) during the commencements, had on numerous occasions felt that God was intervening in his life to help him discover the errors he had made, and had prayed for the success of the Protestant/Calvinist cause in Christendom (and thus against James I’s plan for a Habsburg alliance). Moreover, he had four years earlier decided that “the holines of Gods day” had to be “the maine groundworke” for “the practice of all other pious duties” (including making every effort to place learned and godly preachers in vacant pulpits).189 However “godly” Simonds might have appeared to his contemporaries or to us, in his own eyes what transpired on Sunday July 4, 1624, came as a shock. July 4 was the day when he realized that, despite all of his sermon gadding, note-taking, Sabbath observing, divinity mongering, “popery” abhorring, and heresy hating, he had not yet attained a full and complete understanding of the Christian faith. The day before, he rose early to ride from Stow Hall to Kediton, the seat of his “verie entire freind,” Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston, then sheriff of Suffolk. In Simonds’s vocabulary, the word “entire” was reserved for the deepest and most highly valued friendships. He was also drawn to Kediton by the presence of Abraham Gibson, another “entire” friend whose preaching, counsel, and advice had been important to his mother and who had left the Middle Temple for the rectorship of the church of St. Peter and St. Paul in Kediton in 1618­. On Sunday he heard “two excellent sermons in the publike” and had “much religious & solid conference in private” with Barnardiston and Gibson. As a result, he related in his autobiography that he learned moore touching the Nature signes causes & effects of Faith that principall Christian grace then euer I had done before; soe as I became not onlie much humbled but a little amazed at my former ignorance, seeing plainlie that all other graces did soe causallie proceed from faith & depended vpon it, as noe man could either trulie loue God or doe any other good worke in a right manner vnles it sprung originallie from Faith.190

To apply Peter Lake’s important distinction, the first Sunday in July marked Simonds’s moment of transition from a “credal” to an “experimental” version of Calvinism.191 That he himself understood its significance is evident from his statement that he discovered that he was both “humbled” and “amazed” at his “former ignorance.” He continued to talk about his newfound understanding of God’s grace “with others first & afterwardes with” Gibson, gaining thereby “much satisfaction” and fully perceiving “the invaluable happines of conversing with those whoe weere good & vertuous.”192

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Fig. 2.2. The pulpit in the church of St. Peter and St. Paul, Kedington (ca. 1610) from which Abraham Gibson preached the sermon that impressed Simonds so deeply on July 4, 1624. Note the hour-glass stand on the right. The rooflike “tester” over the pulpit helped the preacher project his voice and was an early seventeenth-century innovation in many parishes led by Puritan patrons and ministers. Photo by J. Sears McGee.

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Fig. 2.3. The Barnardiston family pew (ca. 1610) is very near the pulpit, and as Sir Nathaniel’s guest, Simonds would likely have been sitting in it when he heard Gibson preach. It incorporates parts of a parclose screen (ca.1430). Photo by J. Sears McGee.

On Monday, July 5, Simonds read a little book entitled The Life of Faith by Samuel Ward, “an eminent preacher of Ipswich” in Suffolk (and the same man who published an anti-Spanish and antipapal engraving in 1622 that Simonds admired but led Ward into difficulty with the authorities). He found that it contained “manye excellent directions & instructions” for applying the doctrine he had received the day before from Gibson’s sermons and the ensuing conference with Gibson and Barnardiston. His reading of Ward’s book led him to decide neuer to give ouer the disquisicion of faith till I had gained an exact knowledge of it, & should bee enabled in some good measure to practice it: in which Christian & pious resolution it pleased the diuine hande soe farre to strenghen & enlighten my soule, that I did not onlie attaine the vse &d comforte of that grace it selfe in a large measure but the issue & crowne of it alsoe, being a certaine Hope or assurance of mine own salvacion in the worlde to come.193

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That his profound commitment to this new spiritual regimen was firm in the years immediately following his July 1624 stay at Kediton is apparent from a Latin treatise that he began to compose in 1627, a treatise he labeled his “Indications of certainty in the matter of salvation . . .” Its contents and the circumstances in which he wrote it will be examined more thoroughly in the next chapter, but the evidence it provides about the new component of his spirituality must be mentioned here. In it he wrote about how during that time with Gibson and Barnardiston he came to understand that although those who possessed “this certainty” about their salvation would still “have their doubts, . . . nevertheless these doubts are never to be considered to be regarding the nature or existence of faith.”194 soteriological debates Simonds’s conviction that individuals chosen by God to enjoy the undeserved gift of salvation to eternal life would nevertheless experience moments of agonizing doubt was exemplified very soon after his soteriological enlightenment on July 4–5, 1624. On August 2, Francis Boldero died. Simonds wrote that he and Boldero had enjoyed “a most entire freindshipp” for the previous four years, during which they had talked to each other about their “most intimate secrets.” The young man died suddenly of “a burning feauer & some inward greife,” and Simonds attended his funeral in London on August 3. Shaken by his friend’s death, over the following days Simonds felt himself weighted down by “one sad thought after another” until he “fell into a strong & dangerous temptacion” that proceeded from “the Diuel himselfe.” Although he knew that Boldero “had manye good desires & inclinations” and “a firme & full adhering to the true religion,” Simonds nevertheless found himself wondering “whether my freind weere saued or not.” He knew that Boldero’s “course of life liuing idlie for the most parte about London” had not been altogether that of “a man truly pious.” Simonds was frightened to discover himself pitched “upon those two dangerous rockes of atheisme”— namely, doubting first whether the Scripture’s promise of salvation was valid, and second, doubting even “whether ther weere a soule.” “I was soe amazed to finde my selfe intangled in these desperate scruples” and yet at the same time “resolued not to smother them.” He consulted with Peter Baals, his “verie louing freind” who had been called to the bar at the Middle Temple alongside Simonds two summers earlier. Together, they concluded that to doubt the existence of the soul was extremely dangerous, for without it we are mere “brute beasts” for whom the existence of

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“a heauen or hell heereafter” is irrelevant. Whereas the soul of a newborn infant or of “a perfect man” has numerous “faculties,” their proper functioning could be weakened or indeed virtually destroyed by “distempers” such as drunkenness or “hott diseases” that lead to states of “frenzie” or “maddnes.” Yet there were also times when the soul displayed “admirable effects of its power,” such as when in dreams “men conceiue sett oracions & speeches, read in ther imaginacions difficult authors & propound sublime difficult questions to some other they fancie to bee present, who answers them & resolues the doubts.” Simonds had indeed experienced such a thing, having composed in his sleep “long discourses in soe loftie & elegant a latine stile, & with soe exact a method” that he could never have produced when awake even after “long & much studie.” Simonds and Peter decided that “those vnrulie thoughts of atheisme weere the diuels engines, & the fruits of infidelitie, not to be dallied withall or disputed, but to bee auoided, praied against & resisted by a strong liuelie faith.” Indeed, “out of his infinite goodnes,” God could “give a good issue to the vilest & soarest temptacions.”195 Of poor Boldero’s fate, Simonds appears to have remained uncertain, but he at least managed to re-establish his confidence about the existences of the soul and of eternal life against the devil’s insidious temptations. Simonds respected and admired well-educated ministers, but he did not do so uncritically, especially where central aspects of Calvin’s soteriology were concerned. Consider the debate about the possibility of certain assurance of salvation that transpired in July 1625 between Simonds and Edmund Cartwright. The place was Stow Hall, and the only member of the audience was Paul D’Ewes. According to Simonds, Cartwright had denied that Christians could attain certain assurance of their salvation while in this present world. Simonds cited William Perkins’s famous Reformed Catholicke and insisted that they could indeed have such assurance if they went about it in the right way. Cartwright had matriculated at Cambridge in 1589, so he was probably some twenty years older than Simonds. Cartwright had been vicar of Brandon Ferry in Norfolk since 1602 and rector of Norton, Suffolk, since 1613.196 Norton is just a mile or so south of Stowlangtoft, and there was and is a footpath between the two churches. Simonds wrote that “wee controuerted the point long, not without some passionate eagernes on my parte.” He was disappointed that his father, with whom he had “diuers times discoursed” on precisely this issue, said little, but also “gaue some strong signes & hintes of his inclination in opinion to my antagonist.” That Simonds’s resentment of Cartwright still simmered when he wrote his autobiography is indicated by his acerbic comment that, since the cleric simultaneously held two liv-

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ings in different counties, he probably did not “much trouble himselfe in making sure his inheritance in a better world.”197 Nevertheless, it is clear that Cartwright backed down quickly in 1625. Just a few days after going back to Norton, he wrote to Paul to say that he had studied the matter of assurance further and concluded that Simonds had been right.198 What led him to do this is uncertain. He probably knew that Paul had himself sat at Laurence Chaderton’s feet in Cambridge and took his Calvinism seriously. If Cartwright was merely an ambitious pluralist, that might have been reason enough to retreat from a confrontation with the intense young whippersnapper at Stow Hall. Or he may have genuinely felt that Simonds had misunderstood his position during the conversation. Whatever Cartwright’s motivation for his retreat, Simonds spent the following Sunday “at the vacant times between divine service” writing a lengthy explication of his position as a response to Cartwright’s letter to his father.199 That he took considerable care with it is evident from the fact that his papers contain a fair copy of his response in his clerk’s hand, into which Simonds inserted a small number of minor changes. Presumably the harried clerk then had to recopy the entire four densely written leaves yet again.200 In his essay, Simonds asserted that there was a considerable difference between the way he remembered the conversation and the way Cartwright represented it in his letter to Paul D’Ewes.201 Although he was pleased to see that Cartwright now agreed that “an infallible certaintye of saluation may be attained vnto in this world, thoughe mixed with doubtings,” Simonds nevertheless claimed that in one particular Cartwright’s position still inclined toward “the Papists” in that he held that “we haue this certaintye by hope, whereas the tenent of our Church is wee haue it by ffaythe . . . for indeede hope is but a fruit of a iustifyinge ffayth.”202 In any case, Simonds’s autobiography hints that his intended audience for this little essay was not so much Cartwright as his own father. He reported that, as his servant was recopying it, his father happened into the room and “casuallie” read over it and later let him know that “hee noe way misliked” it.203 the widow ogle At the end of July in 1623, Paul D’Ewes wrote to Simonds at the Middle Temple with news from Suffolk. He said that it seemed “almost a miracle” that Lady Dorothy Ogle “yet liues, in paines almost intolerable in greife vnspeakable.”204 He knew that Simonds had been to see her often during his visits to the country, and the young man related her wrenching story in his autobiography at length. What proved to be his last visit to her occurred on December 22, 1625. A widow, she resided at her brother’s

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house just a mile from Stow Hall.205 Their father, elderly when she was born, pampered her while she grew to be “tall of personage & a verie louelie browne woman” (“brown” meaning brown-haired). “In the prime of her youth,” she married Sir Richard Ogle of Lincolnshire, but her doting parents prevailed upon her husband to allow her to continue to live with them so they could continue to provide lavishly for her “worldlie happines.” Blessed by God with children and wealth, she “abused these blessings by her excessiue pride & vanitie, making it the cheife care of her life to adorne her bodie & satisfie the immoderate desires of her appetite.” In her conversations with Simonds late in her life, she told him that she had “rather desired varietie of apparel & new fashioned; then rich and costlie.” Sir Richard, who did not stint himself so far as his own pleasures were concerned, indulged her no less than her father had and borrowed heavily to do so. The result was that soon after her father died, Sir Richard lost his land to creditors. Even this did not prove enough, and he found himself in the Fleet for debt.206 Suddenly impoverished, Lady Dorothy came to believe that her condition proceeded from “Gods wrath & vengeance vpon her, & the forerunners of her eternall doome.” She was afflicted by “extreame despaire; which the diuell prosecuted soe cunninglie” that she decided to commit suicide. In 1616, while living in “a poore lodging upon Ludgate hill” in London, she hid a knife in her bed. When her servant went to sleep, around midnight she “gaue herselfe a deepe gash or thrust into her throate” that caused her to cry out. Her maid awoke, saw her bleeding badly, and ran into the street screaming for help. She would almost certainly have died “had not a wonderfull if not a miraculous prouidence of God” intervened. At that moment, “a surgeon was comming that way with salues & instruments” he intended to use to assist an injured man. Instead, he followed the maid upstairs to her mistress, stopped her bleeding, and saved her life. Sadly, Lady Dorothy’s rescue did not bring her troubles to an end. Simonds, who became one of her spiritual counselors, opined that “the Deuill hauing failed in this first assault” continued to pursue her even after her brother John took her in and provided a comfortable home. She remained suicidal, “groaning vnder a continuall despaire of Gods mercie.” She told Simonds that her only comfort was her belief that “there weere degrees in hell of torment” and that the best she might hope for was suffering “of the gentlest sorte or the lowest size.” Simonds visited her frequently, and on each occasion he prepared himself “with some new arguments of consolation.” He tried to convince her that there was still “hope of enioying heauen” and ridding herself of “infidelitie & doubtings.” He made two arguments that “wrought much vpon her.” The first

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was that “the loue of the godlie is a most assured signe of true Faith” and that such love is “moore easilie discernable then anie other grace” and could “comforte Gods Elect, when all other graces seeme to be obscured & ouerclouded.” His second point was that God often afflicted “his owne deare children, for those verie sinns which hee had forgiuen, not in anger but in mercie for future preuention.” Simonds had used a variant of this stratagem in his first letter to his father after the disastrous 1620 fire at the Six Clerks’ Office: “Yow know afflictions are the touchstones by which Gods children are tried, they are the waues in which they are plunged, & the enemyes by which Satan striveth to batter the bulwarkes of ther faith & patience.”207 With such persuasions, Simonds “drew her to beginne to conceiue shee had true faith though assaulted with many doubtings.” As though her spiritual sufferings were not enough, she also suffered daily from terrible headaches, so painful that she said it was “as if a dagger weere strucke into her skull.” He saw the scar from the wound in her throat and described her as looking like “a meere scheletone . . . being reduced to nothing else almost but skinne & bones.” She died not long after but had at the end the benefit of “some moderate comfortes inwardlie and refreshings of faith.” At one point in his account of Lady Dorothy’s saga, Simonds compared it to the then famous “storie of Francis Spieras despaire” that “the pens of many learned men” had related. Spiera (d. 1548) was an Italian Protestant who had attempted suicide and ultimately died of starvation after becoming convinced that God had condemned him to eternal damnation. Numerous attempts by learned scholars and other well-wishers to free him from his despair failed, and accounts of his life and death were printed in various languages all over sixteenth-century Europe and were reprinted into the nineteenth century.208 Except for the brief remark in his father’s letter in 1623 about her, there is no trace of Simonds’s absorption in Lady Dorothy’s ordeal during the period it occurred. Yet it loomed large in his mind when he came to write his autobiography over a decade after her death. Perhaps this was because, by then, he had himself suffered many painfull losses in his own family and witnessed setback after setback for the Reformed religion in the British Isles as well as in Continental Europe. We have seen from his debate with Edmund Cartwright in July 1625 that the question of whether we can know whether we are truly among God’s elect was very important to him. It should also be remembered that Simonds had already experienced religious despair in the aftermath of the sudden death of Francis Boldero the previous summer. His intense discussions with Peter Baals began at that point. The effort he made to help Lady Dorothy may have stemmed partly from his fears about his own salvation

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and perhaps also from regret that he had not assisted Boldero in his final days. In any case, the years after July 1624, when he began his conversion to an “experimentall” faith, would prove a critical period for the development of his spirituality.

The Suitor Simonds D’Ewes had been in London for less than six weeks when a new tragedy struck his family on a very cold day. On Friday, November 17, 1620, he and his sisters Jone and Grace received news that their younger sisters were sick. In a heavy snowfall, they hurriedly walked a mile to the school where Marie and Sissilia boarded in Walbrook parish. Marie, who was twelve, had just recovered from smallpox, but Sissilia, two years younger, had then fallen ill. Simonds did not know “whether shee tooke cold & soe droue in the malignant humour, or else which is moore probable ouerheated her bloud & soe fell into a burning feauer by taking much bezar [a counterpoison or antidote] and saffron to driue it out.” Like her mother and namesake, she died between eleven and twelve in the morning on a Friday. Her siblings did not manage to get there until she was “past all sense,” and very soon after their arrival she died. They were told that her illness had begun only three days before, but that “it is scarce credible what signes of grace shee expressed at her yong yeares.” She had prayed “verie feelinglie during her sicknes & would often crie out, Christ my Sauiour haue mercie vpon mee.” She repeatedly spoke of “her religious Mother, saying, I will goe to my mother; . . . I will shortlie bee with her.” Just thirty minutes before she died, she had said, “I shall die presentlie, wheere art thou, o death?” Simonds wrote that “shee had a uerie well fauored & pleasing countenance” and that “her iudgement witt & memorie did soe farre surmount her yeares” that many who knew her suspected that “her life would bee shorte.”209 The painful loss of Sissilia, however, would be followed by many years during which the D’Ewes family was preoccupied not with deaths but with marriages. As we have seen, in 1621, Jone (age twenty) married a widower, Sir William Ellyott. He had an income of ₤700 a year and pleasant house in Surrey just thirty miles from London. Simonds thought him a “very iudicious, honest man,” and he had worked to “cleare diuers rubbs” for Ellyott during the negotiations with Paul D’Ewes about the match.210 On September 22, 1625, Grace D’Ewes (age twenty-one) married Wiseman Bokenham, Esquire, of Thornham Magna, Suffolk, at St. George Stowlangtoft. On December 4, 1626, Marie D’Ewes married Sir Thomas Bowes of Much Bromley in Essex. This was surely the young couple that Paul mentioned in a letter to Simonds written during the summer of 1626;

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he said that “Moll” (a nickname for Mary or Marie) had been at Stow Hall and that concerning her and her “sweethart . . . ther was liking on all partes.”211 The youngest sister, Elizabeth, who was not quite a year and a half old when her mother died, would marry Sir William Poley of Boxted, Suffolk, on March 15, 1636. Thus, the marriages of Simonds’s sisters appear to have occurred in a timely manner. Each may well have had “rubbs” that delayed them somewhat, but compared with the efforts of Simonds and Paul to marry, they seem relatively uncomplicated. the failed attempts Shortly before his fifteenth birthday in 1617, Simonds D’Ewes was being discussed as a possible partner in marriage to one of Sir Thomas Barnardiston’s daughters. When wealthy landowners planned marriages for their offspring in early modern England, they often used go-betweens to facilitate the negotiations. Because Simonds would marry Anne Clopton nine years later, it is ironic that the agent in this case was her father, Sir William Clopton. Sir William, a widower, would die in 1618, and he was Barnardiston’s son-in-law. He wrote on December 1, 1617, to inform Paul D’Ewes that he had “propounded” the marriage to Sir Thomas and his lady. “Their answer was,” he reported, “that they haue heard soe much of the honest and religious disposition both of your selfe and your wyfe, that they doe wish it may take effect.” Clopton asked Paul to confirm that he remained interested in such a match and that he had not “otherwyse disposed” of his son. He also suggested that a good place to meet for consultation about the next steps would be Lavenham should Paul’s business bring him there, but if not he would travel to Stowlangtoft for the purpose. He also expressed the hope that “yf god haue soe devised it” he could “be a meanes to compass it” and thereby “doe a seruice verye acceptable of both sydes.”212 The advantage of having intermediaries such as Clopton, familiar with both families, was that if either suggested a condition that he realized might be thought of as dishonorable or unreasonable, he could give warning. He could indicate that it might be perceived as offensive or excessive and therefore in need of further thought. Since marriage negotiations were called “treaties,” it was appropriate that diplomatic skills were needed to facilitate unions. They tended to be either trusted local clergymen or kinsmen (or both, since several people might be involved).213 Unfortunately, the record gives no indication as to whether the notion of this marriage went any further, and if it did why nothing came of it. Simonds himself might not have known that his father was considering this proposition. This is not to suggest that Paul would have attempted to force his son into marriage with someone for

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whom he had no feeling, as the subsequent history of the various treaties shows. The first time that the question of marriage for Simonds appeared in his autobiography was August 24, 1620, when he visited Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston and Abraham Gibson at Kediton. He came there after spending a week at Stow Hall, enjoying the company of two of his sisters, his five-year-old brother Richard, and his father. Paul, in an unusually expansive and generous mood, told his son—who would soon begin his legal studies at the Middle Temple—about his finances. Paul’s income stood at approximately £3,000 a year, and the expense of maintaining his household came to less than £1,000. He intended to spend the difference buying more land and enlarging and enhancing the manor house itself. He then said “how willing hee was to see me speedilie well married, and to settle his estate vpon mee.” Since Simonds had long chafed at his “short stipend,” this was music to his ears, and it emboldened him when he was at Kediton to consult with his “kinde freind Mr. Gibson . . . about some fitt match” for himself. After he was settled in London and frustrated by his lack of a room in which to study, he saw marriage as a way out of his straitened circumstances.214 In October 1620, a match was suggested by his friend Francis Boldero, and he remembered discussing it often with Boldero over the next six months. The young lady was Jemima Waldegrave, and Simonds later remembered her as his “first loue.” But first he had to be properly outfitted for a courtship, and the expenditures listed in his account book demonstrate that this was an expensive undertaking. He ordered a suit, doublet, and cloak, and the fabric alone (twelve and a half yards of “seagreen sattin” and four “ells of seagreen taffatye” for the linings of the cloak and doublet) cost £11. Completing the ensemble required another £18 6s (seagreen silk stockings and garters, “points” of lace, buttons, ribbons, “perfumed gloues,” embroidered hangers, brass spurs gilded with silver, “white Spanish leather bootes,” two handkerchiefs, a ruff, a sword, and a beaver hat). The tailor’s bill was £1 15s, and that did not include £1 10s for “rasing” the satin and “pinking” the taffeta. The mirror he needed cost only 1s 6d. He spent £2 14s on the journey to Essex, making the grand total £37 6s 6d. In each of three preceding quarters, his living expenses averaged just £25.215 In other words, the cost of his new finery and the travel into the country would have maintained him in London for four and a half months. On May 25, 1621, Simonds, with his father’s encouragement, arrived at the Waldegrave estate and met Jemima and her parents over three days. Her mother, Lady Bingham, was the widow of Sir Richard Bingham and the second wife of Francis Waldegrave of Lawford Hall in Essex. At their

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first meeting, he found Jemima not “soe handsome” but later changed his mind about her looks, perhaps encouraged by the “manye remonstrances of acceptation & affection” that she offered. Indeed, her father said she had never before been so keen on a suitor, and Simonds’s optimism grew. Yet he feared his “fathers inconstancie,” and sure enough, Paul gave him a letter to take back to Jemima on his second visit that “was penned in a good phraise, but mixed with some vnseasonable imperious passages.” He discovered that Jemima and her father seemed ready to overlook the “imperious” phrases, but Lady Bingham balked and vowed that “her daughter should neuer come vnder his power.”216 The negotiation limped along until it ended in failure in September. Sadly, its existence forced him to decline the offer of a kinswoman of the gentleman at the Middle Temple who had shared his chamber with Simonds. This lady was “a coheire of a great and a noble familie,” and he would have grasped the opportunity “with much alacritie & thankefullnes” had he been free to do so.217 The final collapse of the Waldegrave treaty and his father’s continued niggardliness about his inadequate stipend caused Simonds, as he put it, to express himself “somewhat vnadvizedlie” to his father by bringing up the Devon estate of ₤5,000 or ₤6,000 pounds left to him by his grandfather Simonds that he thought he should have access to but which his father continued to control. As a result, Paul became “soe extreamelie offended with mee as hee neuer was before that time nor after it.” They spoke to each other only once during the next five weeks. Simonds even feared that his father would disinherit him and marry “a yong widow meanlie borne & bredd.” Finally, his father retreated a little and paid at least the arrears on Simonds’s stipend. The storm had passed, and he found himself entirely restored to Paul’s “loue & affection.”218 the “golden valentine” At the time, the only good thing to come out of the Waldegrave fiasco from Simonds’s point of view was that it proved “the cheife occasion that my father proceeded noe further with the yong widow with whome hee was at this time in treatie.”219 Ever since 1619, Simonds had been deeply worried about his father’s marital projects. His mother, Sissilia, had died in July 1618, and he remembered having “feared dailie” that Paul “might marrie some yong woman.” Indeed, Simonds recalled that his father was “often drawen into treaties of that nature.” A second wife might bear children who would encroach upon the inheritance of Sissilia’s children. Stepmothers often worked to enhance their children’s interests at the expense of their stepchildren, and Sissilia herself had been worried about such a prospect as she lay dying. Although “it pleased God afterwardes out of

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his great goodness to preuent” that outcome, Simonds had good reason to be concerned about the consequences of such a marriage for himself and his siblings.220 Had Simonds been reading Paul’s letters to a young widow named Mary Prince, he would have known that his worst nightmare came close to becoming a reality. The letters, as usual with Paul, are undated, but they contain clues that suggest the correspondence began in 1621 and continued into the following April. Late that year, when he was fifty-four years old, Paul met a woman he addressed in his first letter to her as “my much Beloved and kind Client Mary Lady Prince.” Her age is unknown, but he commended her for her intention not to “venture vpon youth againe, altho yow are in your prime.” She had sought his legal counsel, and after reviewing the document that concerned her jointure, he had to give her some bad news. He told her that, although her title to the land promised to her from her late husband’s estate was sound, it would yield little income, and the document barred her “from all hope of further dower.” He praised the note she had written and sent along with the document as “plainly made, but very deare.” He urged her to be “wary” about her next marriage, especially if she should find herself considering an older man because she liked “his estate better then his person.” It was, he continued, “the easiest thing to be maried, and the hardest to be well matched, for when the minister is past, both may be vndone, but neyther can be vndone.”221 Despite his advice that she exercise caution about marrying an older man, Paul proposed marriage to her and by the time of his next letter was becoming impatient for her decision. Describing himself as her “Golden Valentine,” he said he could wait until Easter and that she still had “his whole love.” But he reminded her that this was the third time of his asking and that the night before she had “faithfully promised” to give her answer. He then vowed that if “out of any humor or misreport, or bad counsel yow refuse . . . this last offer, . . . yt will neuer be tendered yow againe.” On the contrary, it might well “be caried elswhere” very soon.222 By the time he wrote again, he was spending the Easter vacation at Busbridge and had come to regret his rash vow, saying that he was very sorry to have made his “late thoughts legible” and asking her to burn all his previous letters. He hoped that “after a burning yow will (as heertofore) love me better.” He wrote that her resemblance to his late wife was “as yf yow were twinnes, faire, modest, familiar, good, and witty alike, but in face the very same.” At some point in his courtship with Mary, Paul had given her his late wife’s ring, and his letter from Busbridge mentioned that “my children also miss ther Mothers ring but doe not aske what is become of yt.” But when his daughter Jone queried him about it, and he told her that

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“next weeke she should see yt, eyther in gold, or in ynck.” This must have meant that he was hoping that Mary would come to Busbridge having agreed to marry him or that she would write accepting his proposal. In closing he wrote that “lastly as your Valentine I comend my love vnto yow, and out of that love I doe wish yow heer, wher we are plentifully fed both for soule and body.”223 Paul may have begun to have second thoughts when he complained in another letter to Mary that she had not responded to his query about the ring. Mary seems to have taken this badly, and he explained that, in memory of Sissilia, he considered the ring “so vertuous, as I will not give yt to any, that is not my owne, as she was.”224 The next letter begins “Good Lady, and my Dearest Valentine,” and he praised the first of her two letters to which he was responding for having “more true divinity in yt, then Samson or Daniel.” But he was troubled that “you neuer remembered my wifes ring” and expressed his hope that she would—at last—decide whether to accept his proposal of marriage. Back in London when he wrote this, he went to her lodging in the hope of speaking with her, but she was not there. He signed it “your Valentine & true frend, Paul D’Ewes.”225 He had earlier commissioned his cousin, John Stanley, to recover the ring from Mary. He provided a letter to Mary for Stanley to present to her authorizing him to take the ring. But on April 5, 1622, Stanley reported to Paul at Busbridge that when he saw her in London, she was “gentle wthout any manner of anger.” But she had declined to turn over the ring because when Paul had given it to her she had promised she would not relinquish it to “any boddye but onlye to yor selfe.”226 Whether this news influenced Paul’s next step by convincing him that she was a gold-digger or he had already decided she was untrustworthy is unclear. But his complete change of heart was obvious in the first sentence of his final letter. He told her that “by the conference of good men, and by the consent of my best frends, the scales of louve, that were wont to hudwinck my iudgment, by the gall of your manifold and manifest wrongs are removed.” He thanked God for making him see “very plainlye” that “you are not fitt for me.” He asserted that she had dissembled about her jointure and other matters, causing him to lose “these idle sixe months” to her “cunning & concealing.” He accused her of entering a precontract to marry another gentleman at the same time he was paying court to her, such that “yt seems yowr only purpose is to markett” in order to find the highest bidder. “For my parte,” he wrote, “I neuer took out this lesson, and I am to[o] old to begin.”227 Unfortunately, the only relevant response from Mary to Paul appears to be an answer to an earlier exchange between them about fees that she owed him but had not paid. Nevertheless,

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it probably represents her ultimate opinion of him as well. She wrote that she now knew that he loved “monne better then me.” And in a postscript, she added that whereas God commanded Christians to take good care of widows and orphans, his conduct had borne out what she had “ben tould by manie that you loue monne too much.”228 If one were to build a case that Paul’s grasping nature and “inconstancy” in matrimonial matters were not figments of Simonds’s imagination, his behavior in the Prince and Waldegrave episodes would be good places to start. During the Christmas season of 1621–22, Simonds’s light reading was Barclay’s Argenis, and he took “great delight” in it. The author, William Barclay, lived in France and was the son of a Scot who had taught civil law there. The Argenis was about a princess who was sought after by many suitors. Perhaps Simonds enjoyed it because it was about the pursuit of marriage.229 On January 18, 1622, he learned that Jemima’s father, Francis Waldegrave, had died the week before when the clergyman from Lawford came to see him bearing the suggestion that there should be “a double match” in which Simonds would marry Jemima and Paul would marry the now twice-widowed Lady Bingham. Why she would have considered marrying a man she had found unacceptable as a father-in-law for her daughter is a mystery, but the minister could only have presented the notion with her knowledge. Perhaps she thought she had the necessary experience and fortitude to deal with the irascible Paul. In any case, Simonds noted in his cipher diary that he “conceaved much hope” at the renewal of the Waldegrave marriage proposal and offered his “poore praiers to God for a happye issue.” Two days later he spoke to his father about this new proposal and learned that, as usual, he was “most inconstant.” Simonds, his hopes “dashed,” decided “now not to build upon any thing.” Sure enough, on March 21 he discovered that his “hopes at Lawford in Essex were now, the second time, cleare dasshed.”230 He appears not to have known that this interval was precisely the one during which his father was in hot pursuit of Lady Mary Prince. lady elizabeth denton During the ensuing summer and early autumn of 1622, all was quiet on the marital front, but on the eleventh of November, a misty day in London, Simonds noted that he visited a widow “to whome my father was suitor, with my sisters.”231 This could not have been Lady Elizabeth Denton, because on February 18, 1623, his father sent for him again “and the busines was about a ladye widow whome hee was about to aske in marriage.” At that point, Simonds knew neither her name nor her age—which he would have known if it was still the lady he had visited in November—and so

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“saied little to it.”232 This woman was the widow of Sir Anthony Denton and the elder sister of Sir Martin Stuteville’s wife, Susan. The sisters were daughters of the late Thomas Isham of Langport, Northamptonshire, and his heir Sir John Isham was their brother. Elizabeth must have queried her sister about Paul, because on January 28, 1623, Susan replied from Dalham that her husband knew “the gentleman” in question. This man was “one of very good fame and esteeme in the country where he dwelles, which is not aboue a dosen miles from Dallham.” His annual income from land was £1,500 and from his office £1,000, “and further to induce you he hath a delicate house farre exceeding Dallham.” As to his “disposition,” Susan said that she could not “thoroly informe” her sister but that she and her husband had “neuer harde [heard] but well.”233 Although Simonds initially took little interest because he expected that Paul’s courtship of her would end as had Paul’s other connubial campaigns, he soon decided that Lady Denton nicely fitted the specifications that would best meet his and his siblings’ needs. After praying about the matter, he decided to do whatever he could to bring the marriage about. At this point, Paul, true to his old pattern, changed his mind and was again leaning toward marrying someone younger. On the morning of February 25, Simonds went to Paul’s office, praised “the conueniencie and fitnes of this match,” and received his father’s permission to visit Lady Denton and try to restart “the former treatie againe which had been abortiuelie dissolued.”234 That same afternoon, Simonds went to see her and managed “though with some adoe” to bring things “prettie well about againe.” Two days later the match seemed to be again at risk, and he “trotted about” between Paul and Lady Denton to advance it. His shuttle diplomacy seemed to be succeeding, because on the next day, “it pleased God that once moore all things weere sett right againe” and instructions to “draw the indentures” for them to sign were given to a lawyer who was “a gentleman of our Temples.” On March 1 another hitch occurred, “my father remaining constant in inconstancie,” and Simonds expected that Paul would “find some other starting hole to make a rupture.” By this time, Simonds was almost too “wearye to stirre any moore in it,” even though the indentures were almost ready for signatures.235 On Sunday, March 2, Simonds rejoiced that he heard two sermons, but his father directed him to deliver to Lady Denton a set of “almost new propositions” that evening. He was relieved when they met and found that these proposals were “not soe much disliked” as he had thought they might be. On March 4 he learned that “God had now concluded the match between my father and the ladye” and that the wedding would be the next day. On Wednesday, March 5, he and his father went in Paul’s coach to St. Faith’s church (in the crypt beneath St.

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Paul’s Cathedral). He witnessed their marriage and “soe spent the day ioyfullye ther with them.”236 Although Simonds certainly helped smooth out the obstacles created by his father’s mercurial temperament during the courtship, Paul exaggerated when he wrote to Abraham Gibson a few days later and announced that “I am become a maried man to a wife of Symonds chusing.” She was, he continued, “asneer fifty as forty wthout any child,” and brought to their marriage £2,000 in cash, £200 a year in income, and “a faire house to boot” only twenty-two miles from London.237 The house was at Tunbridge Wells in Kent, and it would soon be used for vacations between the law terms by the whole family. lady anne clopton Paul’s marriage to Elizabeth Denton meant that Simonds could stop worrying about a remarriage that would undermine his and his siblings’ prospects. Moreover, during the summer of 1623, it will be remembered that Simonds was called to the bar, enjoyed the increased income that his father provided after the call, undertook the increased duties at the Middle Temple that went with his new status as a barrister, and began the archival researches whose fascination grew rapidly for him. This is not to say that he lost interest in marriage, only that he no longer urgently needed it in order to escape from his poverty and that he was caught up in activities that required most of his time. On January 31, 1624, his friend Mr. Masters “casuallie” said to him that the Protestant military hero Sir Horace Vere “had fowre or five daughters and coheirs.” Simonds wrote in his cipher diary that he “earnestlie desired” to marry one of them because “besides ther most religious bringing upp, they weer of the familie of Oxfoorde” whose illustrious pedigree he had studied alongside Sir Robert Cotton. But he knew no one connected with the Veres at this time, and nothing came of the suggestion.238 He would later come to see the failed matrimonial efforts as God’s way of saving him for the right marriage, the marriage with Anne Clopton about which he had what he called his first “serious thoughts” on April 26, 1626. When he introduced the subject in his autobiography he stressed the fact that she was descended from “many other great & ancient families besides her owne; with whose goodlie & faire coatarmours her sheild was enriched.”239 The marriage would certainly go a long way to restoring his status to the luster that had been dimmed by the “ecclipse” from the aristocracy following his great-grandfather’s emigration from Gelderland. Anne’s family was, he wrote, “justlie reputed the first for antiquity in that shire, which in Gods prouidence had planted mee, & would link mee by alliance to most of the gentrie therin to whome I was yet a stranger.” Her father’s house, Luton’s Hall (also

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Fig. 3.4. Portrait of Anne Clopton (1626). Reproduced by permission of the West Stow Anglo-Saxon Village Trust.

known as Kentwell Manor), was surrounded by lands that yielded £500 a year, so the marriage would bring prestige immediately and income eventually. The rents would not come to her until the death of her stepmother, Dame Elizabeth Tracy. Simonds also knew that Anne “had been verie religiouslie educated vnder Dame Ann Barnardiston,” her maternal grandmother, after the death of her parents. Paul had earlier proposed more lucrative matches for him with daughters of leading London merchants, but even he could see that Anne was the first heiress Simonds fancied who “next to religion”—the highest priority—would bring linkage to “ancient stockes” and “good bloud” to their children.240 Retrospectively, Simonds realized that God “of his infinite goodnes”

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had decided to give him a marriage which “next my birth I may well account the greatest worldlie happines that did euer yet betide mee.” He invariably interpreted the good things that came to him as gifts from God and his setbacks as equally from God in that they were designed to lead him to see that he had committed a sin that required repentance and correction. At about the same time that the Clopton marriage project was initiated, he quarreled with an individual he did not name, nor did he mention the nature of the conflict between them. But he later decided that it was a “notable affliction” that God decreed in order to rid him of his “selfe-conceit & Pride of heart, to both which I was naturallie prone & enclined as most men are.” For the next four months, he suffered “vnder the feare & doubt” of its outcome, and it often “hindred my appetite, & broake my rest and sleepe.” He resolved the matter with an apology on July 20 and received the man’s “pardon & forgiuenes.” Simonds’s anguish then “passed away like a dreame & a shadow,” and “the blessed humiliation” he had received from God served as “a happie warning for euer after to mee, to beware of ouer valluing mine owne partes & abilities, & to giue the onlie glorie to God from whome I receiued all I enioied.” When he reflected upon “the excellent fruit & effect the diuine hand” bestowed on him in this and other sufferings, he knew and acknowledged to others that although he “had felt manie great crosses & losses,” all of them had been necessary for his own reformation.241 The initial suggestion for this marriage came from Anne’s uncle, Walter Clopton, and he had proposed it in March 1626, when, as Simonds put it, his “thoughts weere fixed elsewheere.” But when that negotiation ended unsuccessfully, he went to Walter’s lodging in London in the hope of getting him to be “the instrument” to persuade Dame Ann Barnardiston to consider the idea. She was Sir Thomas Barnardiston’s second wife and widow, and the stepmother of his dear friend Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston. The young lady was her ward, and no marriage would occur without her approval of the groom and the terms. Simonds did not find Walter at home, but fortunately Sir Nathaniel also suggested soon after that he marry young Anne. Sir Nathaniel was Sir Thomas’s eldest son and a brother of Anne’s deceased mother. On May 12, Simonds and Sir Nathaniel “conferred seriouslie of it” and reviewed documents that described the young lady’s property. Simonds then placed the proposal in front of his father and received his enthusiastic permission to pursue it further. Consultations, which included another old friend, Abraham Gibson, continued through May and into June, and the would-be groom, aware as ever of what he called Paul’s “wonted inconstancie,” worried that trouble lay ahead. On June 19 he arranged a meeting with his father, Sir Nathaniel and his brother

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Arthur (a lawyer of the Middle Temple), and himself at the Six Clerks’ Office. Its purpose was to discuss the final terms of the treaty, and Simonds was shocked when Paul “suddenlie broake all offe somewhat abruptlie,” thereby leaving the young man “amazed at it & extreamelie deiected.” He began to fear that he would never marry until after his father’s death, but he had one more card to play. He suspected that his father had been offered another match that would bring a larger portion from the bride’s family, and he interrogated Lady Denton to try to confirm his suspicion. Although she admitted there was another proposal, she felt unable to tell Simonds the name of the lady. He persuaded her to give him one guess, and if he said the right name she would tell him so. “I found I had hitt the marke,” he exulted, because he had seen the lady and knew that he could not love her, even though “her porcion was voiced to bee neare upon five thousand pounds.” Returning to his father on June 29, he renewed his arguments in favor of the Clopton treaty and stressed his desire “to restore & purge out the interruptions of mine owne familie.” Then he delivered his bombshell. He claimed that, having heard of the lady with the huge portion, he “had made a visit to see her, though vnknowen; but finding her face rough & vnpleasant I could upon noe termes affect her & therfore neuer acquainted him with it.” Paul, having no idea that his wife had spilled the beans, told Simonds that this was indeed the very prospect that had led him to break off the Clopton negotiation. “But now that hee vnderstood my resolucion hee gaue mee full authoritie to proceede with it againe.” Meanwhile, the shrewd Sir Nathaniel had suspected that this “rubb” would be “shorte & temporarie” and had withheld telling his stepmother about it. Thus the campaign could continue despite the ten-day interruption.242 Alas, just when Simonds thought that “all matters weere sett right againe,” at the end of June he learned from Arthur Barnardiston that Sir Thomas Coventry, Lord Keeper of England, had expressed an interest in a match between his eldest son and Anne Clopton. This caused “much feare & unquietnes” for Simonds, and he decided for the time being not to tell his father about this new threat. Arthur, meanwhile, met with Sir Thomas and explained that Anne’s estate was hers in reversion and would not come to her until her stepmother died. Still worse, Anne’s uncle Walter claimed “some title to it.” Coventry’s interest vanished at this news, and early in July all was in place for Paul to write to Sir Nathaniel and to Dame Ann laying out the terms of his proposal. Arthur took the letters to them, and he told Simonds to expect that he would soon get a letter which would specify “the day & place” at which he would “enioy the full libertie of seeing & speaking with the yong gentlewoman.” However, just when Arthur and Simonds thought that the way ahead lay open, Dame Ann chose to

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exercise her authority over her ward. In Simonds’s opinion, “as my father had acted his parte of inconstancie, soe now beganne the olde Ladie to play hers.” She first proposed a marriage for Anne to a gentleman in Essex. Discovering that he was engaged in a different treaty, she then turned to Viscount Saye and Sele of Oxfordshire and offered her ward to his son. When the viscount balked, as had Sir Thomas Coventry, over the reversion of Anne’s estate, Arthur Barnardiston then took Dame Ann to task for her “vniust & vndue proceedings” and pronounced them “misbeseeming” to “the Religion shee professed.” Thus confronted, she quickly retreated and on August 12 accepted the terms Paul had offered except for a small detail to which he quickly assented.243 From Stow Hall, Paul wrote to Simonds excitedly: “Yow desire hast[e] and my pen was never dry since the receat of your letter. The acceptance of my offer so lovingly shewes them very willing.” He urged his son to “moderate” himself lest they think him too keen and thus introduce “some more rubbs yet.” Yet he expressed his delight that Simonds was settled “in the match of a matchles wife. God for this be allwayes praysed and we made more thanckfull for yt.”244 Arthur promised to travel with Dame Ann and her granddaughter to Sir Nathaniel’s Kediton Hall at whatever time Simonds chose, and he selected August 25. On that day, he finally saw, for the first time in seven years, the very young woman he hoped to marry. Anne was thirteen and a half years old. From that earlier occasion, he remembered her as “a prettie little one,” and when he met with her this time “her person gave me absolute and full content as soon as I had seriously viewed it.” The next day, he spoke at length with her grandmother and enjoyed “some plesant conference” with Anne, “whose louing & discreete entertaining” of him was delightful.245 Thus began what Simonds described as his “wooing time” with his inamorata. Back at Stow on August 31, he dispatched his servant to her with a “diamond carcanet” (necklace) and a letter from him. These went to Clare Priory, the home of Sir Nathaniel’s brother Giles, where the ladies were visiting. As he would during the courtship and the early years of their marriage, he carefully wrote in large italic letters widely spaced, since ladies were taught the italic hand rather than the very different secretary script that most men used in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. “Fairest,” he began, and begged her that the “poore inclosed carcanet” when not worn around her “purer necke” would “yet lie hidden in the private cabinet of her, whose humble sweetnes & sweete humilitie deserues the iustest honour the greatest thankefullnes. Nature made stones but opinion iewels, this without your milder acceptance and opinion will prooue neither stone nor iewell.” At the same time, he wrote to her grandmother to tell her that he had sent Anne “a few vnpolisht lines

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& a poore remembrance” and praised “the sweetnes of her disposition & goodnes of her nature.”246 On September 4, Simonds rode to Clare Priory and spent five days in further conversations with the two ladies. These included some “priuate conuerse with my Dearest,” to whom he found himself drawn as much by her “humble & discreete deportment” as by “the comelines of her person.” He returned to Stow Hall, where he and his father entertained the Barnardiston men for the final agreement on “the marriage-conueiance.” On September 19, Simonds, Anne, and her grandmother made the twenty-five mile journey to Albury Lodge in Hertfordshire, the home of Anne’s aunt, Hanna Brograve, and her husband, John. Hanna was the youngest daughter of Dame Ann, and Simonds described her as “a verie comelie gentlewoman, . . . full of knowledge & of exemplarie pietie.” Still worried that his father might change his mind yet again and that “some greater offers might bee made to tempt the old Ladie,” Simonds lobbied her to approve the marriage quickly. He felt that “the longer the busines hung in suspence, the moore likelie it was for some rubbs & stopps to occurre.” He discovered that Dame Ann had one reason for proceeding with haste and two reasons to delay. To gain control of her grandchild’s wardship, she had promised to pay £500. The payment was due in October, so the money that would come to her with the marriage would be welcome. But, on the other side, she worried that because of Anne’s “tender yeares” her life might be at risk “if shee should prooue with childe too earlie, vpon her deliuerie of it.” She also feared that the affection Anne had for Simonds “was noe solid or reall loue grounded on iudgment” and thus might diminish as she matured. He vowed to her that he “would forbeare to reape the fruits” of the marriage until Anne was older and that he would use the same care to increase her affection for him after marriage that he had used to gain that affection during the courtship. On the very next day, Dame Ann “mooued her grandchild to assent to a speedie marriage,” and it was solemnized at Blackfriars Church in London on October 24.247 The long odyssey of Simonds’s journey toward matrimony was finally ended, and in personal terms the happiness that he would enjoy could scarcely have been greater. His private life after his marriage, despite new difficulties caused by his father and by financial stresses, became a warm haven from the public arena in which darkness increased and fears multiplied both at home and abroad.

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3

The newlyweds spent their first six weeks together in London at the home of one of Simonds’s cousins at Blackfriars. He remembered the time as “daies of happie content & reioycing together each in other.” Anne regretted the departure of her grandmother on November 1, 1626, but Simonds’s elder sister Jone Ellyott and her husband came from Surrey at the same time and remained for more than a month, giving Anne “much contentacion” from their company. The entire family reveled in the news that on November 5, Simonds’s sister Grace Bokenham gave birth to her first child in Great Thornham Hall. At the time of her marriage the previous year, the ever eager genealogist Simonds studied the history of the Bokenham family and eventually discovered that it was “very ancient” and “first seated in Norfolk.” In 1638, Simonds noted that this lad was “still liuing to the great ioy of his parents.”1 By then, Simonds and Anne had lost five children to early deaths and had only two daughters still living. His genuine pleasure in his sister’s son’s survival must have been shrouded by the pain of the deaths of his own little ones. On November 14, 1626, Lady Denton, who had attended Grace during her lying-in, came to London with Simonds’s two youngest sisters, Marie and Elizabeth. They lodged, as usual, with Paul at the Six Clerks’ Office. Anne rushed to see them as soon as they arrived and “in their societie” was “verie happie during her stay in the cittie.” Marie married Thomas Bowes at St. Faith’s on December 4 in the presence of all these kinfolk.2 On Monday, December 6, 1626, Simonds was knighted by King Charles I at Whitehall. There was a connection between the timing of his knighthood and the marriage of Simonds and Anne. In September, Ann Barnardiston had written to Paul D’Ewes about some of the final details when the negotiations for the marriage treaty were nearly complete. She told Paul that she was confident “of the good beginings of grace in yor Sonn” and that these intimations of his eternal salvation carried more weight in

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her decision to permit the marriage than Simonds’s estate. She expressed her hope that her granddaughter would find in him “a Religious louing husband,” if indeed “God shall please for to vnite them.” Yet, as we have seen, her indifference to temporal concerns such as wealth and reputation had its limits, and she went on to ask Paul to arrange for Simonds “to vndergoe that ordinary stepp of honor . . . that so shee might auoyde the contempte of some il wilers to these proceedeings, and he gaine further respect amonkst her kindred by these little additions.”3 In financial terms, the “addition” was large, not “little.” According to Simonds’s account book, the king extracted £364 from him for it.4 His correspondence around this time contains no mention of the knighthood, and his autobiography has only a laconic, matter-of-fact sentence reporting that the event indeed occurred.5 Did he resent the mercenary aspect of this advancement and therefore choose to say little of it? Did he believe that honors which could be purchased conveyed no true and lasting honor? Was it unimportant to him because he was convinced that his Netherlandish forebears had so far exceeded him, at least at this point, that he still had miles to go? None of his regular correspondents—other than altering the way they addressed him in the salutation and on the dorse of letters—offered congratulations. The record he left, so rich in so many ways, is silent here, and the silence— which would recur with his baronetcy in 1641—is unlikely to be accidental. During the fourteen years between his marriage and his election to the Long Parliament, the pattern of Simonds’s life changed in two significant ways. First, for the six years before the marriage, he had lived in London and sojourned in the country during many of the vacations between law terms. This pattern was to be reversed after his marriage. Although there would be many short visits to London as well as a few longer stays there, much more of his time would be spent in the country, first in Hertfordshire, and later Islington near London and Bury St Edmunds, Lavenham, and Stow Hall in Suffolk. Second, when he decided not to pursue a legal career, one of the preoccupations identified in the previous chapter diminished. He continued to have many contacts with lawyers and forgot little of what he had learned about the common law. He repeatedly used this knowledge when dealing with property disputes and probate matters. Indeed, as early as January 1627, despite “the wayes being deepe & durtie and the season colde & sharpe,” he found that he had to travel often into the country on business connected with his wife’s manor of Newenham Hall at Ashdon in northern Essex. Later he would be forced to initiate lawsuits defending her inheritance that would force him to make “manie vnwelcome & troublesome iournies.”6 Nevertheless, having aban-

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doned the law as an occupation, his life revolved around four concerns rather than five. Religion, political news, historical research and library building, and family remained central for the rest of his life. As before, his interests and activities frequently connected with each other in various ways. For example, research and family came together in the tremendous energy that he put into studying the history of the various families into which his sisters married and of course into the Clopton family. He also kept hard at work on his own ancestry. The long-running quarrel that developed between Simonds and Richard Damport, the new rector of St. George, Stowlangtoft, upset the peace of his domestic world. Political and religious news remained, as before, linked to his convictions about the English constitution and his deep theological and spiritual commitments. His own piety was therefore often affected by events in the Thirty Years’ War that he learned of from Sir Albert Joachimi and others. In this chapter, we will examine the period from his marriage to the death of his father in 1631, beginning with the story of how during this interval, Simonds completed the construction of his personal and familial piety.

The Complete Puritan In November 1626, Ann Barnardiston wrote to Simonds at Blackfriars. “Good sonne Dewes,” she began, and went on to report that she had spoken with her daughter Hanna “about your coming downe to Lye with vs; shee with my selfe, and my sonne Brograue, are very willing to enioy your company.” She charged Simonds with taking “speciall care” of Anne’s health. She closed wishing them “all happinesse in this Life, and the Life to come” and signing herself “Your Louing grandmother Ann Barnardiston.”7 On Monday, December 6, Anne traveled to the Brograve home, Albury Lodge in Hertfordshire, Simonds having tarried in London to be knighted. He joined her on Friday, and their stay would last fourteen months. Although most must have thought him a thoroughgoing Puritan already, his experience in the Brograve household convinced him that his religious practice was not yet complete. We have already had occasion to observe that his piety had been built up incrementally over many years. The next increment emerged when the Brograves introduced him to a practice that would be repeated in the D’Ewes household with great solemnity, seriousness, and regularity. In the autobiography, he mentioned that he spent Thursday, February 15, 1627, “chiefelie in priuate fasting and praier, and other religious exercises.” He had earlier taken part in the “publike fasts” that had official endorsement, but he had always avoided private fasting because of “the papists superstitious abuse of it.” February 15 was therefore his first performance of this “dutie performed alone in

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secret, or with others of mine owne familie in priuate.” Simonds discovered so much spiritual profit in fasting of this kind that he read what he regarded as “a uerie learned and solid discourse” on it by Henry Mason, the rector of St. Andrew Undershaft in London. Mason demonstrated “that Christians ought to sett some times aparte for ther ordinarie humiliacion & fasting.” Simonds followed this advice from 1627 until he completed his autobiography in 1638, and he therein stated his intention to “continue the same course soe long as my abilitie & health shall permitt mee, to the end of my life.”8 He later noted that he had averaged a fast a month from 1627 until mid-1638, after which he reduced it to once per quarter.9 The timing and length of Simonds’s fasts varied. In the early stages, he fasted “sometimes twice in the space of fiue weekes.” Occasionally, he ate a small amount of food about 3 p.m., but his later practice was to abstain from food entirely until 6 p.m., having spent the entire day praying, confessing his sins, and performing other “religious duties.” The sins he confessed were those of “infirmitie” because he never committed what he called “controuersall sins” that he knew offended God (such as “vsurie, carding, dicing mixt dancing & the like”). Exhibiting lawyerly caution, he also avoided breaching the canon against joining in a fast attended by families from more than one household.10 He did this despite the fact that he sent a query about fasting alongside friends who were not kin to the aged cleric at Hunston, Richard Chamberlain, in May 1627. Hunston was just a mile east of Stowlangtoft, and Simonds fondly remembered the funeral sermon that Chamberlain had preached for his late mother.11 Chamberlain advised that Simonds could fast with others since it was perfectly appropriate for Christians who were “familierly acquainted & bordering neighbors to meet togither after a spirituall manner” for prayers, exhortation, and comfort and “to forbeare meat & drink till they have finished ther prayers.” To deny their right to fast together, Chamberlain argued, was absurd because no one questioned that Christians could dine with friends. Once that was noted, it seemed obvious to him that they could also fast together when circumstances called for self-denial.12 assurance of salvation When Simonds initiated his fasting regimen, he also began to write an account of his religious progress and convictions up to this moment in his life. In this essay, he stated that in the Brograve household “we found a family most piously governed according to the norm of the ancient church” from whom he “learned the wholesome use of personal pious fasting.” He described his essay as “framing an evidence of marks and signs, for my assurance of a better life.”13 English Puritans anxiously

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sought “assurance” that they were among those predestined by God to receive the unmerited gift of salvation. They were absolutely certain that each elect person’s soul was bound for heaven; the difficulty was about how to gain and maintain confidence of that while enmeshed in the vicissitudes of life and suffering during the inevitable intervals of doubt as to whether their confidence in their election was spurious or valid. Simonds drafted it in English and labored over it at intervals for the rest of the year before pronouncing it complete on January 19, 1628. He later made a Latin translation, which survives in his hand. Having made his list of sixty-four “indications” of his own salvation, he “found much comforte & reposednes of spirit from them”; they helped him to become “moore carefull then euer before to walk warilie, to auoid sinne, and lead a godlie life.” This demonstrated “the diuelish sophisme & error of the Papists, Anabaptists, or Pseudo-Lutherans, & profane atheisticall men, who say that assurance brings foorth presumption & a careles wicked life.” We will consider more fully below Simonds’s way of lumping his varied theological enemies together, but here he conceded that gaining a well-grounded assurance was neither easy nor straightforward. When “men will pretend an assurance of the end, without vsing the meanes,” they were in desperate spiritual danger. However, he insisted, “when a liuely faith & a godlie life are ioined together, and are the groundworke of the signes & markes of a blessed assurance, heere the verie feare of loosing that assurance, which is but conditionall, will bee a meanes rather to encrease grace & vertue then to diminish it.”14 This was his answer to the favorite polemical ploy of the Roman Catholics and the anti-Calvinist Protestants, which was to argue that the doctrine of predestination encouraged spiritual pride, immorality, overconfidence, and even antinomianism. The quest for assurance figured prominently in the first letter he sent to his young bride after their marriage. On January 31, 1627, while in London about legal matters, he wrote, “My deare, . . . my greatest worldlie comfort consists in the enioing of your sweete affection and most desired companie.” He described himself as “whollie yours” and keen to “heare of the health of soe blessed a part of my selfe as Gods prouidence hath made yow.” And he told her he would be most happie to see and know yow to grow euerie day moore and moore sincere and conscionable in the feare and seruice of God; that soe yow may gett knowledge and faith sufficient to discerne whether yow bee in the estate of salvation or noe: for this will bee a greater comfort unto yow in life or death then all the honors or wealth of this worlde.15

Simonds entitled his essay the Indicia sive signa pere credentis (“Indications of certainty in the matter of salvation”),” and like other documents

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he composed with particular care, its margins are festooned with citations that buttress his arguments and assertions. The writings of Calvin himself and such pillars of English Calvinist divinity as William Perkins, William Ames, Thomas Brightman, and John Prideaux are among his many references. The prefatory section is partly biographical, rehearsing his spiritual history. He wrote that his first twelve years of life were characterized by “great ignorance of divine worship,” but then he made a “small start towards the exercises of religion” thanks to “the example and instruction” of his “most pious mother.” He interpreted his youthful practice of sermon note-taking as evidence that God was planting “certain seeds in us of the knowledge of true faith.” After his mother died in his sixteenth year, he sought “to flee to God with prayers more swiftly” and “to resist sins and to avoid the society of the impious.” In that period he recalled that he had “hardly dared to dream of acquiring undoubted certainty of our future happiness through faith.” Yet he did then believe “that many holy people of former centuries had attained it,” and he also knew that “the Papists deny that this certainty” is attainable while “our church and all the orthodox” insist that it can be achieved. Although personally lacking such certainty concerning his own case, he “gravely upheld the truth handed down by them, which relied on the scriptures.”16 Simonds then turned to what he had heard when Dr. Abraham Gibson preached at Kediton on July 4, 1624. Enlightened by Gibson and by Samuel Ward’s book about “the true nature of faith,” he restated the answer he had made to Edmund Cartwright’s attempt to “impugn this certainty” in their discussion at Stow Hall in the presence of his father back in July 1625. This argument enabled Simonds to resist “the poisoned heresy of the Anabaptists and their follower Arminius” by citing “what our church taught, contrary to his subtleties, concerning that truth.”17 God then, Simonds opined, “made me happy above that which can be expressed with a pious, modest chaste wife, and the offspring of an old stem . . . piously educated as she was by her maternal grandmother.”18 Simonds’s decision to make his list of “Indications” was by no means a singular thing for him to do. On the contrary, countless Puritan preachers had long been urging their listeners and readers to examine themselves for the presence of divine interventions in their lives in order to establish and maintain their assurance of their elect status. They used terms such as “marks,” “signs,” and “evidences” to refer to what Simonds called “indications” and “tokens.” The seventeenth of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England spoke of the “sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort to godly persons, and such as feel in themselves the working of the Spirit of Christ” as it evinced itself in their thoughts and actions. The

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famous preacher John Preston, for example, listed observance of the duties of the Sabbath as one important sign of the possession of saving grace, whereas it was evidence of reprobation if “your hearts, and sanctifying the Sabbath will not agree.”19 Against the backdrop of the advance of Catholic armies on the Continent in the 1620s, Preston warned that if you learned of “the desolation of the Churches, and of the increase and growing of Poperie” without being grieved, you should consider it “a signe that you want love to the Lord.”20 Simonds would later urge his father to read one of Preston’s books during a severe illness.21 Given his studious temperament, it comes as no surprise that Simonds’s “first token” was that he had always been “very diligent to know all the principles of religion and all the rest of the matters which have regard to divine worship.”22 Yet ever fearful of the sin of pride, his second was to resist “boasting” about his knowledge of these things and to be vigilant against any undue “elation” about them—a practice “by no means found in the reprobate.” Thirdly, he took note of his love of “divine truth” and his hatred of “all the heresies opposed” to it and especially to such “dregs of Pelagian blasphemies” as papists, Anabaptists, and Arminians. Under this heading, he added that he was “especially confident” that he could never “be dragged by the tortures of torturers from the pure worship of God to idolatry.”23 He buttressed his claim that the origin of Arminius’s teaching lay in the “Anabaptists, the followers of Pelagian blasphemies and Jesuits’ sophistries” with a marginal reference to Article 8 of Archbishop Cranmer’s Forty-Two Articles.24 That article states that “original sin standeth not in the following of Adam, as the Pelagians do vainly talk, which also the Anabaptists do nowadays renew.” Rather, it “is the fault and corruption of the nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam.”25 Simonds’s eighth indication was the fact that he avidly sought “the company of the pious” while avoiding the “impious,” and the language he chose to express this is significant. He saw it as evidence of his possession of the ability to judge between “things that must be rejected and which must be chosen,” an ability that “flows from faith” and was “placed” in him by God. In the twenty-eighth indication, he elaborated upon this, stating that “the most lively of all the tokens” is “love towards the pious . . . . And hence an especially lively solace has arisen for me since I loved from the bottom of my heart all Christians whom I knew worshipped God piously and faithfully.”26 Preston concurred when he said that the godly naturally sought out each other’s company and that he who wanted to “be in any company rather than theirs” thereby displayed an “infallible sign” that he was not among the elect.27 Another group of Simonds’s signs had to do with “love of the sacraments.” For example, number twenty-six

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was that he “was intensely vigilant” not to permit his “private devotions” to get in the way of his “worship in the public church” on the Sabbath. In addition, he sought reverently and continually to take part in the administration of the eucharist; and I especially made an effort that I might discern the body of the Lord with the eyes of faith (and might eat it with the heart and not the mouth) and that I might judge it to be spiritually (and not carnally) present, and, finally, that I might notice at least the internal refreshments of the holy spirit, the image of dew, falling down on my soul.28

Despite his insistence on regular participation in public worship in a parish church, Simonds admitted to occasional “weariness of mind” when doing so. Nevertheless he “resisted this infirmity” because he knew “that the impious and hypocrites are only pleased by their own set forms in praying but are little moved by the pious prayers of others.”29 By the time he finished his small treatise, Simonds had compiled a total of sixty-four “indications” or “evidences” of his spiritual felicity. He took care to emphasize that “the foregoing graces” were not “causes” of faith; rather they were “the undoubted signs and indications by which the holy are informed that they are justified,” and justification came “solely and simply from the will and good pleasure of God through the merits of Jesus Christ, no respect being had either for our faith or good works seen before.”30 He remained fiercely opposed to violations of the holiness of the Sabbath for the rest of his life. For example, in a 1629 letter to Sir Martin Stuteville, he reported that “on Sunday night last the two Earles of Salisburie & Northampton & the Lorde Compton” were traveling down the Thames and their boat flipped over as they were “shooting the bridge & saued almost by miracle: God will not haue men too bold . . . with his day.” Moreover, on the previous Sunday the king had devoted the afternoon to an elaborate audience and dinner for the Russian ambassadors in the “greatest pomp.” Thousands of Londoners had skipped “both seruice & sermon” in order to find places on the streets or in windows to observe the procession of courtiers, and they had indulged in the drinking of “healths & quaffing & playes” that went on “till almost the next morning.” Simonds pronounced all of this a “horrible profanation” of the Sabbath.31 the habsburg threat Simonds’s “Indications” have a further aspect that must be mentioned here, although it might seem to lead us away from “religion” and into “politics.” But for him, soteriology and worship could never be separated from the fortunes and misfortunes of Calvinism nationally and internationally. Every advance he made in his personal piety, however valuable

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in immediate terms, he also considered in relation to the fact that what he considered “true religion” was losing ground to its opponents and that he and his kind of Protestants ought continually to prepare themselves for the possibility that they might suffer persecution if they remained steadfast. Like the Marian Protestants, they might have to choose between burning at the stake and fleeing into exile. Although we know from hindsight that Simonds’s fears would prove unfounded, this should not prevent us from recognizing that they seemed eminently reasonable to him and many others in the late 1620s and 1630s. Indeed, a principal reason he began to make his list was to be “in some degree prepared against all the whirlwinds of changes and dangers.” He enumerated the “whirlwinds” he had in mind as he wrote in 1627: the loss of Bohemia and the Palatinate to the Habsburgs; the Elector’s exile at The Hague and the loss of “his electoral voice and dignity” to the duke of Bavaria; the defeats suffered by those who tried to help the Elector (including the duke of Saxe-Weimar, Count Mansfeld, and the English fleet at Cadiz in 1625). Then in 1626 and 1627 “new damages and dangers fell on the Evangelists,” that being the term he often used for Reformed Protestants when writing in Latin (and occasionally in English as well). The king of Denmark’s army was crushed at Lutter and the dukedom of Brunswick was overrun, bringing the Imperial forces to the edge of the Baltic Sea. The English under the command of George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, failed disastrously in an attempt to assist the Huguenots by besieging the Isle of Rhé near La Rochelle in June 1627. He was forced to abandon the siege in October after heavy losses.32 Simonds and Anne had been at Albury for just over six months when the siege of Rhé began. These events threatened the very survival of what for D’Ewes was orthodox Christianity, and although “the divine hand” had granted him many “outward good things,” he wondered “how long I may continue with them or they with me.” He asked, “should we not be roused up to fasts and tears while the very dear bride of Christ is everywhere attacked” by both popish armies and Pelagian heresies and idolatries? In parts of the Holy Roman Empire that had “been free for the Evangelists for almost the entire century,” the “orthodox” were being subjected to “apostasy” by the “Lutherans” and the “Pseudo-Lutherans.” The papists were rejoicing “due to the return of almost an infinite number of timid people to idolatry, like that of a muddied pig to its slough.” These events led “the Papists [to] dream more boldly of the extermination of true religion” and the godly to expect “a long lasting and increasing kingdom of Antichrist.” Even “the hitherto flourishing churches of Great Britain, Sweden and the United Provinces,” as well as those in Switzer-

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land, Sweden, and Poland, were threatened.33 Thus he wrote as 1627 came to an end. In 1632, Simonds added what he described as an “epilogue or conclusion” in Latin to the “Indications” that he had completed more than three years earlier. In it, he reported that during the intervening years he had “found much internal peace and rest of soul” for which he offered “humble, deep thanks to the celestial father who has illumined and directed us in writing and investigating.” He observed that although the struggle between “errors” and “truth” was continuing, the victories of “the decoration and flower of princes, Gustavus Adolphus the King of the Swedes” had given new hope to the godly who had been so cast down by the many defeats they had mourned earlier. This must have been written after the battle of Breitenfeld (September 27, 1631), because Simonds singled out for particular praise the “great opportunity of breathing for German churches” created by Gustavus’s defeat of Count Tilly in Saxony. Tilly had been the Emperor Ferdinand II’s most effective general, so Breitenfeld was a powerful blow against “the Austrian howse which is devoted to Antichrist.” He also saw reason to hope that God had led Louis XIII to perceive that the Huguenots in France were no threat to him. Ever cautious, he worried “that these things will perish” and therefore it was as essential as ever to sustain “that foundation of internal solace” that was built on assurance of salvation, “lest the waves of miseries . . . weigh us down completely when the sudden whirlwind erupts.” He ended the epilogue praying that God would keep the English and Dutch churches free from “Antichristian idolatry and superstition and from the blasphemies . . . of the Anabaptists or Arminians.”34 the early britons and pelagianism Simonds’s “Indications” contained another subject that seems to take us from “religion” into “history,” but it must be considered here because of the significant role it came to play in his thinking about his faith. As the previous chapter demonstrated, he had entered into archival research in British history when he made the first of what would be many visits to the Tower of London in 1623, and his frequent forays into Sir Robert Cotton’s collection of printed books and manuscripts during his years at the Middle Temple encouraged his omnivorous historical curiosity. At that time he was already alarmed by the emergence of Arminianism in the Dutch Republic and in England, and he associated this new “heresy” with the ancient Pelagian heresy. This association was a commonplace, and Simonds need not have read intensively about the history of religion in Britain during the early centuries of the Christian era to have made

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it. In his autobiography the first mention of this topic came in December 1627, where he wrote that he spent much of the month “verie studiouslie in searching out seuerall antiquities of the ancient Brittons ther originall manners & religion.”35 The consequences of this move for his understanding of Christian history would prove to be important and lasting. In the process of writing his “Indications” in 1627, he decided that in order to understand what he described as “that pestilential sect of the Anabaptists, showing forth revived Pelagian blasphemies, under the borrowed and new name of Arminius,” he had to investigate the origin of the heretical ideas and then pursue them “along up to our most dangerous times.” This meant that he had to examine the life and work of “the Briton Pelagius,” who “first scattered his poison against the grace of God and on behalf of the free will of man” in 384 in Rome and in 390 in the eastern part of the Roman empire. Although Pelagius died in 446, his followers preached “the same disgusting heretical dogmas to the Britons,” who were also under assault from the “idolatry of the Anglo-Saxons.” The British Christians, fearing that they could not defeat “such great enemies,” sent for help from France and convinced two bishops there, Germanus of Auxerre and Lupus of Troyes, to come to Britain to lead the counterattack (ca. 457).36 In Simonds’s autobiography, the first precisely datable evidence of his new passion for ancient British history appears in a passage where he wrote that he spent much of April 1628 transcribing a copy of Nennius’s Historia Brittonum from a manuscript he had borrowed from Sir Robert Cotton. Simonds thought that Nennius had written it a millennium earlier and that the copy he worked from had been made four hundred years after the author’s death.37 Modern scholars peg the most likely dates for Nennius as late eighth/early ninth century and doubt that he was actually the author of the work. Whoever wrote it, the Historia Brittonum is still regarded as an important source. At some later point, he found reason to doubt the attribution to Nennius and inserted that Cotton’s attribution was wrong and that it had instead been written “by a Saxon Anonymous” in 620 C.E., “long before Nennius was borne.”38 Further evidence of his burgeoning interest in ancient Britain appears in his correspondence. The opening sentences of a letter he wrote to Sir Martin Stuteville in February 1628 neatly capture the pessimism about events and the quest for “assurance” that suffused the “Indications” he had recently finished drafting. Sir When I thinke of the dreadfull ruine of Gods church abroad, & the imminent desolation which threatens vs at home, I could wish even to dipp my pen in teares not inke, nay rather in bloud then teares. In answeere therfore of your last, I haue presumed . . . as shortlie as I may to present yow wth a sadd veiw, of Europes present calamities, as a iust caveat to strenghen

“To dippe my pen in teares not inke”—1626–1631 your selfe wth sound faith the mother of resolved Patience that when the evill day shall come (which without some vnmatched prouidence from aboue is now in its precipice) it may finde yow not onlie forwarned but forarmed.

Most of the eleven-hundred-word letter contains the sort of news of events on the Continent that he and Stuteville regularly exchanged with each other at considerable length. But just after these opening lines, he introduced information from his reading about religious developments during and after Pelagius’s era that appear nowhere in his writings before this but to which he often alluded later. He compared the times in which he and Sir Martin were living to those of the ancient historians Gildas and his successor Nennius. Gildas, he wrote, had “complained of the sinns of those times which brought on that desolating conquest by the Saxons.” The pagan Saxons had overrun formerly Christian Britain because the Britons had failed to defend the faith they professed and live according to its dictates. “The same sinns in a deeper die & under a heavier burthen doth England at this day groane of,” he told his kinsman. A century later, Nennius provided a “dolefull description of that calamitous ruine.” Cassandra-like, Simonds intoned that “it makes my soule to anticipate our hastening fates. True it is Brittaine then & Wales long after enioied the same true & pure religion wee now doe; till Gregories pedler Austine the monke vainlie stiled Englands Apostle first converted the Pagan Saxons & then peruerted the Brittains true religion.” However, he told Stuteville, there was an important difference between Caroline England and the era of Gildas and Nennius: our times haue much more light then thers; & therfore our sinns crie louder for vengeance; in which ther is alsoe this difference; the welsh Morgans heresie whoe tooke to himselfe the new greeke name of Pelagius, . . . [then opposed by St. Dubricius] is now of late miserablie defended & swallowed downe vnder the foolish title of brainsicke Arminius. Poperie is the moore damnable, this the moore dangerous heresie.39

“Austine the monke” was St. Augustine of Canterbury, the man sent by Pope Gregory I to bring Roman Christianity to the British archipelago in 597. Roman Christianity, Simonds believed, was deeply scarred by Pelagian doctrine and idolatrous worship. St. Dubricius (also known as Dyfrig) was a Romano-British Christian monk and bishop who, according to tradition, was a disciple of St. Germanus of Auxerre and a vigorous opponent of Pelagius. By his assertion that Britain and Wales practiced “the same true pure religion wee now doe,” Simonds meant that the anti-Roman and anti-Pelagian “orthodoxy” practiced before 597 was essentially the same as the religion established by law in the Elizabethan Settlement and sustained during her reign and that of James I.40 As we shall

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see, he would over the years use different terms to denote this “true pure religion.” For example, in his autobiography, he praised the “Princes of the Heluetian Confession who follow Luther in all his truths; and onlie leaue him in his mistakes & oversights.”41 In a January 1638 letter to Joachimi, he referred to the “Evangelical brothers of the Helvetickan purer confession.”42 And in a small treatise published in 1645, he praised “the purer Churches of Christendome, of the French and Helvetick confession” and expressed astonishment that “the Pope himself or his Prelates and Clergie” persecuted “the Evangelicall partie, and especially those of the French, Scottish and Helvetick confession” more savagely than they did Jews and Turks.43 Simonds’s vivid phrase comparing “damnable . . . poperie” with “moore dangerous” Arminianism is a direct quotation from a draft he was writing for an essay he intended to publish with a dedication to the king. His borrowing of the first line for use in his letter to Stuteville underscores his own interest in this way of formulating his doctrinal emphases. The essay, entitled “Great Brittaines Strengh and Weakenes” will be considered more fully in the next section. Like many other projects he contemplated, this essay was never completed, but it contains an explanation of his aphorism that offers significant insights into his religious thought. Poperie is the moore damnable [but] Arminianisme the moore dangerous heresie. For as the Papist hath his God in a box to eate him soe the Pelagian and Arminian his God (I tremble to vtter it) in a box to take him. As the papist would detract from the Sonne in the worke of redemption & Justification soe the Pelagian & Arminian would diminish from God the father in the worke of conversion & predetermination & soe to reduce man with the olde Epicures to a meane & blasphemous conceit of God himselfe.44

Simonds must have liked this distinction because in a January 1631 letter to Stuteville, he reused it when he wrote that whereas the papist “hath his God in a box to eate it” the Arminian “hath his grace in his will to refuse it.”45 This suggests that by “take him” in the other passage that D’Ewes meant dragging the Deity himself down to the level of sinful humanity. In a letter to Joachimi on December 21, 1629, Simonds expanded his list of the progenitors of Pelagianism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He explained that he had happened to read “a certain book written by John Knox, the Scottish Calvin” that he had found to be a perfect antidote to “all the erroneous dogmas, vindicated so bitterly at present by Arminius.” Many of these had been published by Anabaptists during the reigns of Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth. When he combined Knox’s information with his other researches into “the first origin of this poison from our own Morgan” (that is, Pelagius) in approximately 350 C.E. and

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its subsequent history, he found several additional heresiarchs. For example, Sleidanus identified Thomas Münzer, a contemporary of Luther, as “the founder of this insanity” who “first vomited it forth” in Saxony. Next came an unnamed Hollander from Leiden, followed by Sebastian Castellio and Michael Servetus. Simonds wondered whether Joachimi could tell him whether “Arminius himself and Bertius” had come under the tutelage of Castellio.46 The ambassador dutifully responded that he did not know when Castellio died, but he doubted whether either Arminius or Bertius could have known him. Arminius, he reported, had died no older than fifty in 1609, and Bertius (who had defected to Roman Catholicism) was still living in France.47 Simonds may have been disappointed that he could not confirm a face-to-face connection between Castellio and the Arminians, but after 1629 he nevertheless regularly treated them as links of the chain of influence that had begun with Pelagius himself. By the late 1620s, Simonds was taking a long view of the history of Christendom and the role of Britain in that history. From a modern perspective, it seems bizarre to assimilate Anabaptists, Socinians, Arminians, “Pseudo-Lutherans,” Jesuits and papists, but to him they were all unclean birds of a feather, all manifestations of Pelagianism.48 Once free will was uncaged, a miasma of toxins saturated the air. In his historical theology, Pelagius and his disciples had planted the tree of heresy in fifth-century Britain, and the branches that eventually filled out that tainted tree constituted the entire roster of enemies to what Simonds regarded as orthodox Christian theology and worship. During most of his lifetime, popery was the most imminent threat because of the political and military power of the Habsburg princes in Vienna and Madrid, an unavoidable fact that his “Great Brittaines Strengh and Weakenes” would explore. Gold and silver from Mexico and Peru enhanced the Spanish capacity to threaten true religion. Yet Pelagian free will was the single root because each branch, in its own way, brought God down to the same level as sinful humanity, thereby rejecting divine sovereignty. Each preached that sinful humans could dictate terms to God and thus that the clay could shape the potter, despite St. Paul’s dictum that it was the potter who determined whether the vessels he made would be vessels of honor or dishonor (Romans 9:21). Shifting the metaphor, we might say that each produced apples with different appearances and flavors but bursting with deadly poison nonetheless. In his mature years, St. Augustine of Hippo had seen the danger that Pelagianism posed and fought it tenaciously. Nevertheless, the history of Christianity abundantly demonstrated its persistence, a persistence centered in human self-love and the refusal of “flesh” to recognize the superiority of “spirit.” Therefore, the “tree” of Pelagianism kept sprouting up

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after campaigns by the bishop of Hippo and many others kept chopping it down without eradicating its root. St. Augustine of Canterbury, unfaithful to the authoritative insights of the famous theologian after whom he was named, brought it back to Britain at the end of the sixth century. As Simonds continued to study history, his conviction grew that the Christian story in the world was a story about an unending struggle between the acceptance of the spirit’s liberating acquiescence in the truth of divine predestination and the flesh’s stubborn and mistaken insistence on the puissance of human free will. Since he was utterly convinced of the former, his course of action was quite straightforward. He had to struggle using every means available to him to defend the truth whatever the cost, even if it led to persecution or exile. He had to prepare himself and his family for both and would in the 1630s demonstrate intense interest in Massachusetts as a potential refuge. He believed with every fiber of his being that the truth would prevail, but he accepted that neither he nor any other person could know with certainty when it would prevail. That would happen on God’s schedule, not man’s.

The Novellor On October 4, 1628, Simonds and his father left Stow Hall for Dalham, where they spent two days with the Stutevilles. They arrived in London on October 8, just in time for the beginning of the Michaelmas term the next day. Paul wrote a short letter to Sir Martin thanking him for his “free and noble entertainment of me and myne and to lett yow know of our safe coming to London.” He reported news of the marriage of one of his cousins, but then said that “the newes of state I putt vpon my sonne who is a young Novellor and hath Time to hunt after yt.”49 Although Paul was often sardonic, this remark might well have been admiring, and it points to the fact that, having ceased his pursuit of a career in the law, Simonds had more freedom to use his time as he saw fit. From January 1627 until February 1628, Simonds and Anne, as we have seen, lived with the Brograves in Hertfordshire. After their departure from Albury Lodge, their intention was to live half of each year in London so he could “bee neare the publike Recordes & the best helpes I could haue for my studies” and also keep up with the various lawsuits in which he was engaged.50 They remained in London from February until early June and were then in the country until early October when they returned to London for the Michaelmas term. The year 1629 was divided between London, Stow Hall, and Albury until they moved to Islington on December 22. Doubtless, one of the attractions of Islington—just three miles north of the Middle Temple—was its proximity to London. They lived at a cousin’s house in

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Islington until January 19, 1630, when they took up residence in a house that Simonds had rented there. It would remain their home until Paul D’Ewes died in March 1631. It might be thought that Simonds’s access to domestic and foreign news would have suffered from his frequent absences from London and his peripatetic existence. But the ability of the “young Novellor” to keep up with events must not be underestimated. From 1620 to 1626 his sources for news had been rich and varied, to be sure. But the Latin letters he began to exchange with Sir Albert Joachimi, the Dutch ambassador, kept him fully informed about the course of the Thirty Years’ War and particularly the fortunes of the “purer religion” that they shared. This meant he had access to much of the cornucopia of news collected by the far-flung, assiduous, and adept Dutch diplomatic service. The letters were supplemented by many evenings they spent together when Simonds dined with Joachimi at his residence in Chelsea or when Joachimi visited him at Islington. On these occasions, they invariably talked about the threats posed by the Pelagian hydra, and Simonds then circulated much of this information among neighbors and members of his family and also via the newsletter network centered on Joseph Mede at Christ’s College Cambridge. For example, when he dined with the ambassador on January 30, 1627, “wee condoled together the sadd condicion of Christendom.” In January 1628, he rode to the home of his sister Marie Bowes near Colchester soon after the birth of her first child. Meeting there with two of his sisters and their husbands soon after the happy event, he recorded that he “had much comforte in ther societie, but wee had soe manye feares of the publike, that our cheife discourse” was about the danger of a joint Franco-Spanish invasion of England. Although no “wisdome, counsel or policie at home” saved England, he believed “God raised a fire” between France and Spain that led to war between them over Mantua in Italy the following year.51 One need only read the year-end summaries of foreign news he created for his autobiography to realize that when it came to treaty negotiations, troop movements, potential royal and royal and ducal marriage alliances, rising and falling prospects of princes (and their privados, favorites, and chief ministers), and internecine factional struggles that went on everywhere, Simonds must have been among the best informed men of the era. The summaries are also valuable for the insights they provide into Simonds’s political opinions. For example, when the Imperialist general Tilly crushed the Danes at Lutter late in August 1626, Simonds acidly blamed the defeat on Charles I’s failure to pay the contribution of £30,000 a month that he had promised to the Danes. The consequence, he added sadly, was that Lutter enabled the emperor to impose “the Idolatries and

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abominations of the Romish synagouge . . . in the whole Bishoppwricke of Hildisheim” in Saxony.52 the 1626 parliament and the forced loan Around the time of his sister-in-law’s marriage to Paul D’Ewes in 1624, Stuteville had begun exchanging letters focused on domestic and foreign news with Simonds, so he already knew about the information-gathering prowess of the “young Novellor” when Paul made that remark in 1628. Simonds’s lengthy account of Charles I’s coronation in 1626 and of the ensuing course of the Parliament of 1626 in letters to Stuteville were discussed in the previous chapter. Another letter to Stuteville written early in 1627 demonstrates that his removal to Hertfordshire did not prevent him from keeping his friend at Dalham in Suffolk au courant. He left Albury for legal business in London on January 27 and dined with Joachimi on the thirtieth, as indicated above.53 On February 2, his letter to Stuteville bristled with things he had just learned. He related Joachimi’s defense of the Dutch willingness to sell the ships they built to the French and all other nations except the Spanish. To the objection that this would strengthen the French with whom the English were then at war, the ambassador explained that the vessels, which the Dutch built themselves, were exports the sale of which was essential to the Dutch economy. Moreover, they were sold “at a deare rate,” and it was essential to realize “how nearelie” England’s safety was linked to that of the United Provinces. At that very moment Joachimi’s servants were busy making preparations for the arrival of an “extraordinarie Embassadour” from The Hague who “was coming over vpon some new important occasions.” “I guesse,” wrote Simonds, that “hee comes . . . for a moore neare amitie.”54 Simonds then changed the subject to domestic news. He mentioned that on January 27, the authorities had “called in a booke solde for sixpence at euerie shopp before, written I fear by some bolde Scott to the King of Bohemias sonne; in which weere manie daring notions, especiallie touching this state and the Duke.” Although Simonds did not obtain a copy, he did hear that the “pamphlett hath not onlie sett on worke” the members of the Church of England’s High Commission, but even “busied the Councell table” of the king in Whitehall. Having dismissed the 1626 Parliament without achieving passage of the subsidy bill, King Charles was pushing his officials hard to collect the Forced Loan from landowners that he hoped would yield the needed funds. The duke of Buckingham was widely blamed for this unpopular scheme, and doubts about its legality were an obvious sticking point. Simonds noted that he had talked at length with Sir Robert Cotton about it and learned that many worried

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that “tenants will not take lande vnles a collateral couenant bee giuen to free them from invulgar taxes.” He knew of men who had refused to pay the loan, and others such as Sir Lewes Watson and Sir John Isham, Lady Denton’s brother, who had paid only after first refusing to do so. Near the end, he wrote a sentence that, with some variations, would appear in a great many of the letters he would write to Stuteville in the future: “wee all pray the peace of the kingdome and puritie of religion and suppression of idolatrie may continue.”55 The regime’s desperate scramble for money to help the Huguenots looked as though it would cost Paul heavily. In the very same letter that Paul had written to Simonds in August 1626 to congratulate him on his treaty to marry a “matchles wife,” he mentioned that he had just received an official demand for a privy seal loan of £500 (“which is 125 subsedyes at a clap”).56 A different threat emerged late the next year. Paul informed Stuteville that on November 21, 1627, the Six Clerks had been summoned before the Privy Council and told that they were required to pay £10,000. The security they were offered was “a Mortgage of any the kings land.” Staggered by this, he wrote that “what the issue wilbe God knoweth.” He expressed hope that God would save him as he had saved David when he faced the bear and the lion. Three of his children were with him in London at this moment comforting him, and he was “not daunted nor much perplexed at these things knowing that God will protect the innocent.”57 When he responded a month later to Stuteville’s sympathetic response, the storm had, for the moment, passed because a deal had been struck. He and his colleagues had “contracted” with the king to pay annually £800 each from certain specified sources, and they thought themselves safe for the time being.58 Yet the monies the government raised by these dubious means failed to produce the raising of King Louis XIII’s siege of the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle, and the English forces led by Buckingham withdrew in disgrace in October. “The great blowe” at Rhé,” Stuteville wrote to Simonds on November 25, had fallen upon “many more in England” than had died in the fight. “I am perswaded,” he continued, that “ther ar few gent[lemen] in this kingdome, but haue lost a freind or a kinsman in the same.” He considered it “remarkable” that the defeat had occurred exactly seven years to the day that the Elector Palatine had suffered his catastrophe at White Mountain outside Prague. Shaken, Stuteville considered it clear “that God is against vs; and if we doe not apease him wth vnfained repentance, and contrition for our sinnes, noe doubt but he will farther scourge vs.”59 Stuteville’s chagrin is understandable. When the survivors reached Plymouth in November 1626, only 2,989 “poor wretches” remained of the 6,884 who had been paid their wages on October 20.60

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the la rochelle debacle Simonds agreed with his friend’s agonized assessment of the news from France. In December 1627, he fasted twice—once on December 17 with Anne and again by himself on December 29. He acknowledged that his fasts rarely occurred with so little time between them, “but the miseries and deuastacions of Gods church dailie encreasing, it made mee hasten to the finishing of my blessed assurance of heauen heereafter, not knowing how soon I might bee called to a triall.” His account of the setbacks in central Europe was unusually brief. He regretted the sad fact that for about three centuries in Bohemia “the gospell had been moore or lesse professed” (that is, since the time of Jan Hus). But then, after the overthrow of the Elector Frederick in 1620, Ferdinand II, “the bloudie emperour,” had demanded that everyone “embrace & practice the popish superstitions idolatries & errors” and banished “all such as refused who weere of the nobilitie & gentrie” in Bohemia.61 The rest of Simonds’s twelve-hundredword news summary for 1627 consists of a detailed description of the La Rochelle debacle. He began by stating that he had no doubt whatsoever that “the King of Great Brittaine” had “intended sinceerelie & roiallie” to save the besieged Huguenots from destruction when he dispatched Buckingham’s expedition. Here, as elsewhere in his autobiography, it is notable that Simonds rarely referred to the king by his Christian name, although before 1625 he routinely identified him as “Prince Charles.” After 1625, Simonds often omitted Charles’s name and instead denounced his advisers. In contrast to the honesty of the king’s intentions, Simonds wrote that Buckingham had been driven by quite different motives, chief among which was his desire to consummate “his lust with some french Ladie, & other by ends of priuate Revenge.” Simonds asserted that the proof of this was the fact that not long before, Buckingham, “vpon satisfaction of lasciuious desires,” had aided King Louis, the enemy of the “poore Rochellers,” by granting him the use of English ships. Charles, Simonds thought, was “most innocent” in the matter of the ships because he “neuer imagined nor intended” that Louis would, instead of employing them “against the bloudie & tyrannous Spaniard,” send them against “the professors of the gospell” among his subjects, the Huguenots.62 In his narration of the sad story of the Rhé campaign, Simonds lost no opportunity to heap blame on the duke. Although Buckingham commanded “a braue fleete & diuers thousands of Land-forces,” his lack of “skill & valour” nearly prevented the landing by the invasion force at the outset. Since the island and its forts commanded the approach to La Rochelle’s harbor, their capture was essential. If Sir John Burroughs, “an

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old souldier & a braue gentleman,” had not fended off a French cavalry charge, the landing effort might have failed. Although the duke had “at first leapt on shoare amongst the forwardest,” the arrival of the French induced him to return to a boat and stand “farre enough offe from danger, with his sworde drawen in a ridiculous manner.” Once on the island, the duke might have captured its castles if he had taken “the graue & iudicious aduice” of Sir John. Instead, “proud & selfe-opiniated,” he “tooke his owne way” and spent the summer frittering away his opportunities. The French took the time thus afforded them to build up their forces and force the English to flee after suffering terrible losses. Burroughs was killed in the fight, and Simonds even insinuated that his death might have been the result of “the Dukes secret procurement.” Because Buckingham obtained provisions from the Huguenots in La Rochelle itself, his flight undermined their ability to resist Louis’s siege. This meant that Charles I’s genuine desire to help the Huguenots led to their defeat because of the duke’s “miscarriage” or perhaps even his treason. The best that Simonds could say of Buckingham was that he did not intend the outcome that occurred but hoped to win battles that would “have againe ingratiated himselfe with the nobilitie & gentrie of England.” Instead, because “the man had soe fatall a share in the sinns of his lust,” the expedition to Rhé proved a catastrophe “palpable to the meanest apprehensions.” By the end of 1627, these terrible events had led “all men that trulie loued Gods honour & Gospell to partake of much greife and sadnes amidst ther Chrismas cheere.”63 Simonds and Anne left Albury Lodge for London on February 6, 1628, and were “verie louinglie welcommed” by his father and Lady Denton. They lodged in Paul’s suite at the Six Clerks’ Office, and Simonds took pleasure in the use of his chamber and library at the Middle Temple. He also met often with his dear friends Joachimi and Cotton, from whom he caught up on the latest news about the frightening progress of Ferdinand’s II’s forces as they completed the overthrow of the Danes, threatened the Swedes, and appeared to be on the verge of making the emperor “master of the Balticke Sea.” The English fleet was failing to contain the piracy of the Dunkirkers, and trade was therefore suffering. These “sadd alarms in the publike” disheartened Simonds and undermined his efforts to continue his beloved researches which throughout the winter had been devoted to the ancient Britons. The one bright spot was the king’s decision to call another parliament because it was “the greatest meanes vnder heauen now left for the preseruation of the church & state, if it bee not made abortiue by fatall ill instruments.” Yet such “ill instruments” as Buckingham had caused the failures of the Parliaments of 1625 and 1626, so he dared

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not “presume or hope of anie good successe now.”64 This pessimistic statement about the coming parliament was, it must be remembered, written about ten years later in his autobiography. But in the above cited February 1628 letter to Stuteville with its despairing assertions about the neo-Pelagianism that threatened England with the kind of divine wrath about which Nennius had written so long before, Simonds nevertheless still expressed hope that the new, young king might yet be the means through whom God’s truth would prevail. He told Stuteville that although the international religious situation demonstrated the fact that God was “thus farr scourging his true church,” it remained the case that “the same traitors to ther cuntrie” who urged Louis XIII to make “warre vpon his best subjects” (the Huguenots) would also persuade him to ally with Spain in order “to ruine us.” Yet a path remained open to the salvation of both France and England and the defeat of the wicked Habsburgs and Jesuits. It began with “our vnion heere by the blessed success of this ensuing Parliament,” and it included the prospect of a resolution among the feuding parties in France and the continuation of the mutual assistance between the English, the Dutch, and the Danes. By this conjunction, God by “his infinite mercie” might be preparing to “blesse this land as he did Judeaea, by reason of our most godlie, vertuous & sweetnaturd Prince [that] hee hath set ouer vs.” Urging the Stutevilles to “turne to the Lorde with praier & fasting” in supplication for these ends, he signed himself “your most affectionate freind, Simonds D’Ewes.” He also added a postscript in which he directed Stuteville’s attention to nine different scriptures upon which he could rely even “when wee are vnbottomed from all wordlie comforts.” And he closed with the comfort he had received from Joachimi’s report that during his conference with King Charles, “hee found him as sensible of all our dangers as anye subiect hee had could bee.”65 As late as the eve of the opening session of the 1628 Parliament, Simonds remained hopeful that Charles might receive the enlightenment he needed to dismiss Buckingham and save his country from disaster. 1628: great britain’s strength and weakness The parliament opened at Westminster on March 17, 1628. D’Ewes’s fellow Puritan, friend, and neighbor, Sir William Spring, had earlier provided parliamentary news because he had been elected one of the knights of the shire for Suffolk in 1624 and had represented Bury St Edmunds in 1625. It is possible that he sought election for Bury (or perhaps a different Suffolk borough) in 1626 but was not successful.66 In 1628, he chose not to stand, and Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston and Sir Edward Coke were elected for Suffolk. Coke, however, was also elected for Norfolk and chose to take

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that seat, forcing the Suffolk electors to find a replacement for him. Their choice settled upon Spring, who then wrote a lengthy letter to D’Ewes explaining why he had not initially entered the contest. His reasons were “an absolute desire of my freedome from all Publicke imployments, together wth ye regard of my health, & estate.” It is difficult not to suspect that if he had indeed failed in 1626 he did not want a repetition of the same painful experience. In 1628, however, he said that “it hath trobled my Peace & allayed that pleasure of my priuate life; seeing I cannot warrant my selfe that God was pleased wth my striving for itt.” This led him to conclude that he would neither “seeke nor shunne” election because “Gods will shall content mee best.”67 On May 7, Simonds wrote to Stuteville to say that he was sending him a letter he had just received from Spring “which containes moore parliament newes” than Mede’s recent newsletter. Spring wrote of the king’s message to parliament on May 5, which threatened a dissolution if the MPs refused to accept his assurance that no new statutes were needed to protect the liberties of his subjects, in particular from imprisonment without a cause stated on the warrant. In other words, the king was insisting that “his roiall worde” that “the Statutes of Magna. Ch. & the rest are in force” had to satisfy them. “Oh I tremble to thinke & to speake it,” wrote Simonds of the dissolution that would “make a finall & abortiue periodd” to the desperately needed union between king and parliament in England, the union that was essential for the preservation of true religion against the onrushing Habsburgs.68 When Charles I prorogued the parliament on June 26, Simonds took note of his acceptance of the Petition of Right and praised the grant of the “vast & great proportion of fiue entire subsidies; by which meanes both the King of Denmarke might bee assisted, & the distressed Protestants of France releiued.” However, he also mentioned the widespread disappointment at the sudden ending of the session and the continuing resentment of Buckingham (“the bitter roote and fountaine” of the failures and fears of the last three parliaments). And he sniffed that, despite the subsidies, “nothing effected to the full & perfect vniting of the hearts of Prince & people” that he had hoped for.69 Despite the shock he had expressed to Stuteville on May 5 about the possibility of a sudden end of the parliament, Simonds initiated a new research project on that very day. In the autobiography he characterized it as “an elaborate worke” that he intended to offer in print to his countrymen. It was to be a tract for the times which would describe “the present dangers wee weere in,” compare them with “the dangers of former ages,” and offer a plan for “how both church & state might yet be vpheld.” But the king’s prorogation of parliament late in June led Simonds to cut short

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his “collections” of information for the essay because he believed it would have been “too full of Truth & plainenes to endure the publike veiw of the world.” Nevertheless he was pleased that he had garnered “much knowledg” in this effort that would be useful when he came to write his “publike Historie of Great Brittaine.”70 Although his extensive notes made for this work appear at various places in his papers, only an incomplete and rough fifteen-hundred-word draft of the introduction to it survives. Heavily barnacled with marginal notes indicating his sources, he headed it the “prolegomena” to his treatise entitled “Great Brittaines Strengh and Weakenes.” It begins with a view of international politics that Stuteville, Joachimi, and his other correspondents knew well and shared with him: The portentous and farr-spreading Conquests of the Austrian howse and familie followed with the most vnchristian & bloudie persecutions that euer since the primitiue times are recorded to haue wasted Europe, doe soe apparantlie in these daies discover the enraged crueltie of the Romish Antichrist, and threaten a generall and final destruction not onlie to the small remainder of Gods true though little flocke, but alsoe to the common libertie and flourishing continuance of all other kingdomes and free states of Christendome, whome the divine hand hath not yet suffered ther boundles ambition to swallow vpp: as that it weere now but grosse impietie or secure follie, either not to expect ther tirannous force or not to prepare and fitt our selues by a timelie foresight of the extreamest danger.71

He described “this Imperiall, strong, and fruitfull Isle of Great Brittaine” as having been earlier weakened by the long series of wars between England and Scotland, especially those waged during the reign of Henry VIII. During Elizabeth’s “daies of ever blessed memorie,” however, Britain “beyond all other Christian states” had persisted “like the little Remora” that prevented “the huge vessel” of Spain with “her anchors . . . firmlie tipt with Indian golde” from completing the conquest of her neighbors and the destruction of Protestantism. Even persons of “the weakest iudgment” knew that Spain’s “invincible Armado (iustlie cursed in that arrogant if not blasphemous epithite)” had failed to overthrow the Elizabethan regime in 1588. An earlier and promising Spanish opportunity to seize control of England—“the most vnfortunate match” of Philip and Mary—had also collapsed when “a gracious God” had denied them children. Still worse for the Spanish plan “to enthrall our nation & to abolish our ancient Catholicke & most pure religion,” Queen Elizabeth then proved “a most prudent & religious queene surpassing that vndaunted Boadicia or warlike Zenobia” throughout her long reign.72 Simonds wanted to remind his contemporaries of all this because, as he put it, repeated reminders of these events would inspire “all true patriots & free spirits in these times” to maintain the struggle so ably waged by

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Fig. 3.1. Initial page of D’Ewes’s draft of the introduction to “Great Brittaines Strengh and Weakenes.” Reproduced by permission of the British Library.

the Elizabethans. Simonds’s account of the extent of Elizabeth’s role in the salvation of the anti-Habsburg cause would have seemed overblown to many of the participants on both sides of the struggle in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Yet for him, her reign displayed not only “vnmatched victories” and “advized counsels” but “strang deliuerances.” In other words, the governing skills she and her councilors displayed were

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assisted by “a higher prouidence” in order “to bound the house of Austria within the compasse of its owne limits.” He claimed that Elizabeth’s financial and military assistance to Henry III and Henry IV enabled the French to escape Habsburg domination. He insisted that the young Dutch state survived only as a result of her help. As if that were not enough, even parts of Germany and Italy were “helde vpp by the strengh & awe of England.” He thereby came close to claiming that the formerly slight English nation had transformed itself into a rampant lion. But Simonds’s preface then shifted its focus. His treatment of the sixteenth century made it a time of external Spanish assaults that were thwarted. This set the stage for his contention that the Spaniards “haue of late yeares . . . entertained a moore secrett and speedie meanes to vndermine and ruine (if God preuent not) this warlike nation, & with it by vndoubted consequence all other kingdomes & free states of Europe.” They had made this tactical change because they had finally learned “from ther owne manie misattempts both against our selues & others that there was noe hope by hostile force to prevaile against vs & our allies” so long as the anti-Habsburg alliance held.73 When he drafted his introduction to “Great Brittaines Strengh and Weakenes” in the summer of 1628, he depicted a situation in which his country was skating on very thin political and religious ice because of the Habsburgs’ novel methods of pursuing their goals. The new and subtle Spanish approach, he feared, had by 1628 very nearly achieved “the ruine & subversion of our dearest allies & freinds” (meaning primarily, the Huguenots in France and the Contra-Remonstrants in the United Provinces). The treaty with Spain that James I had made in 1604 Simonds characterized as “that happie-seeming peace concluded by his Majesties most roiall father of sacred memorie.” It saved the lives of many soldiers and sailors, but sadly and dangerously it was soon followed by “the proffer of a double match” which brought about “that never enough deplored ruine of our allies and weakning of our selues which these times haue made too palpable vnto vs.”74 He was referring first to the offer of a Spanish bride to James’s elder son, Prince Henry, a project dashed by Henry’s early death in 1612, and then the prospect of a Spanish bride for Prince Charles. But little came of these offers before the Habsburg invasions of Bohemia and the Palatinate beginning in 1620. Simonds, as we have seen, was horrified by the prospect of the marriage of Charles and the infanta and watched with bated breath when Charles and Buckingham rode overland in disguise to Madrid in 1622 to complete the negotiation of the marriage treaty. When the negotiation failed and exploded into recriminations, Simonds had finally been able to exhale, breathe deeply, and rejoice that a deadly

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bullet had been dodged. The prince and the favorite returned furiously angered by their treatment in Spain and eager to make war against their erstwhile hosts. In his prolegomenon, Simonds summarized the matter by asserting that Charles and Buckingham’s “roiall & vnmatched adventure” had by God’s favor revealed the Spaniards “depth of deceit” and had pulled off “this vizard of long treasur’d vpp malice.” As a result, “our enraged adversarie” had been forced to recognize that England could not continue “to bee circumvented by pollicie” and that their plan “to master Europe” could not be achieved so long as “wee remaine safe & powerfull.” Deception having failed, the English must realize that another frontal assault upon their island must be expected because only thus could the Habsburgs proceed to complete their “other conquests” without the impediment that England had repeatedly presented.75 The word “policie” in the lexicon of Simonds D’Ewes and his circle carried a connotation of dissimulation and craftiness. Masters of “policie” were adept “Machiavels,” schemers who played mendacious tricks to achieve their self-interested ends. Simonds averred that it would be better to be at war with the Spaniards than continue the peace because they could not be trusted to keep the peace any longer than it assisted “the advancement of ther owne iniuries and cruelties.” They had “alreadie even peirced the bowels of France,” and it was evident that “the Spanish gold” could buy French traitors who loved it more than they did “the safetie of ther prince and cuntrie.” In the summer of 1628, he clearly worried that similar Spanish stratagems might succeed in England. He intended his treatise to encourage Englishmen who wished to win the reputation “of faithfull patriots & fast servants” to resist the bribes and threats of “a tirannous enemie” to betray “ther owne soveraigne” and enable the Spaniards to annex England with “Romes helpe.”76 Well informed though he was, he could not know that future historians would describe the early seventeenth century as one of Spanish decline. Nor could he foresee in 1628 that the Emperor Ferdinand’s overreaching Edict of Restitution in 1629 would prove to be the high point of his crusade in the German-speaking lands. Still less could he know that the long hoped for alliance of the France of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu with the Swedes would take place in 1635. During the 1620s, Simonds was horrified yet fascinated by what he perceived as the wickedness and deceitfulness of the Jesuits and the Spanish monarchs. This is evident in a letter he wrote to Joachimi from Stow Hall on March 24, 1628. He began by insisting “that it is not possible to cure the stratagems of the Jesuits except by the same stratagems.” He then described an elaborate secret plot the Jesuits had contrived in 1618. Certain

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Jesuits wrote a letter claiming that the Elector Palatine was planning, after taking over Bohemia and other nearby principalities, to travel to England “with the help of the Puritans,” imprison James I and Prince Charles, and add England, Scotland, and Ireland to his empire. Simonds did not bother to explain why the Jesuits would have cooked up such a notion, presumably because it seemed obvious that they wanted to blacken the elector’s reputation and justify aggression against him. Simonds then turned his attention to an alleged Jesuit blueprint for the defeat of the English and the Dutch by Spain, achievable because “Indian gold” paid more soldiers and purchased the treachery of many defenders. The next stage of the plot involved “eradicating the Venetians, Italian princes, and all the Germans both Catholics and heretics.” Then British troops and others could be deployed to topple France, the remaining domino. That left, Simonds wrote, only two barriers to absolute Spanish/Jesuit hegemony in the intact powers of the pope and the emperor. These would take longer to overcome, but eventually Spanish wealth would carry the day against the senior branch of the Habsburgs in Austria. The problem of the papacy was easier to solve, according to this scenario, because ecclesiastical government would “be delegated to the Jesuitical order throughout the individual kingdoms of Europe.” Since the head of the Society of Jesus would direct the disposition of all benefices in the church, “in this way, in the succession of time, the Jesuits, . . . will always conserve all things subject to the Spanish Majesty” and thereby put in place “a new founded monarchy” that would dominate papal elections.77 Ever a skeptic about the validity of sources, Simonds knew that not every rumor or allegation could be trusted, but his suspicion of the inveterate malice of Spaniards and Jesuits cannot be doubted. His view of the French, the Italians, and the Germans was more nuanced, as his admiration for men like de Thou and the Venetian Paolo Sarpi demonstrates. His critical acumen failed with respect to Iberia because of the threat to his values embodied in the policies of England’s Mary I and Spain’s Philip II and his heirs. Yet his repeated references to the silver and gold sent to Spain from Mexico and Peru show that he would have fully understood the modern adage that “money talks.” Simonds traveled to London on Monday, July 7, 1628, after a visit with the Ellyotts in Surrey. On the next day, he talked with them about “the miserable condition of Gods church and children beyond the seas.” On Wednesday he spent the morning with “a true louer of the Commonwealth,” Sir Robert Cotton. Cotton told him that “hee feared all things in England would grow worse & worse; & that ther was noe certaine happines in this life to bee expected.” That afternoon Simonds rode to Albury Lodge where his wife had been visiting her grandmother and the Bro-

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graves. His father and stepmother came there on July 16, and then they returned to Stow Hall by way of Kediton, where they saw Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston. The rest of July and August Simonds spent in “visits discourses letter-writing & such like.”78 Among those letters were two to Joachimi. His August 14 letter was full of excitement about the prospect of a visit by the ambassador and his wife and two daughters to Stowlangtoft. But he also expressed his continuing concern about “the public calamity of Christianity,” and mused darkly about the threat that his generation might be forced to experience the same kind of persecution that the early Christians in the Roman empire had undergone. He cited the opinion of Cassiodorus, the sixth-century Roman monk, that “the church knows how to triumph to the good of the Lord from her disasters; . . . she profits from persecutions; she is always increased by afflictions; she is irrigated by the blood of martyrs . . . is nourished by tears; is restored by fasts; and, rather, increases where the world fails.” From this, Simonds concluded that “we must pray” for “the confidence to die for Christ and to live with Christ with indubitable certitude.” From Cassiodorus he turned to Thomas Brightman, “even the most learned Englishman,” who in his “Commentary on the Apocalypse” wrote that “the crown of celestial glory does not less await those who fall in the fight against the Beast than those who were once slaughtered by the Gentiles by reason of Christ.”79 On August 21 he wrote his next letter to Joachimi, who was by then on his way to his homeland, and promised to offer up “more prayers for a safe crossing” for his friend and to send news of any events that occurred in England that Joachimi would need to know about while he was away. Simonds briefly summarized what he had learned about “affairs Italian” and about French forces that were being sent to the duchy of Mantua to support the proFrench candidate against the Spanish one in the succession dispute there. He feared that the French were paying too little attention to that conflict because of their fixation on defeating the Huguenots. Simonds closed his message to Joachimi by expressing his hope that God would utterly “destroy those Pelagian blasphemies living again under the name of Arminius, again pullulating in your church, and triumphing, for shame, in our selves.” These were the “poisons” that “holy bishops” had neutralized in fifth-century England, but they were revived and doing their deadly work.80 the assassination of buckingham During the late 1620s, the Habsburgs were advancing on all fronts, and Simonds pinned his flagging hopes on the possibility that the French would begin to focus on the Habsburg threat. Instead, and catastroph-

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ically from his point of view, they were busy pouring their energy into finishing off the Huguenot stronghold at La Rochelle. Richelieu and his master, to be sure, acted as they did because they believed they could not act effectively against Spain and Austria until they had secured their rear. This was a position that Simonds could never have accepted because he believed with every fiber of his being that good Protestants could be nothing less than loyal subjects. How, he and most Protestants would have asked, could a king trust subjects who accepted the authority of a pope who claimed the power to excommunicate kings and of a religion that authorized the assassination of kings (such as Louis XIII’s father by Ravaillac)? The only optimistic scenario Simonds could find was that the five subsidies the MPs had approved in June might turn the tide and enable Buckingham’s second expedition to raise the siege and save the Huguenots there from annihilation. This might force Louis XIII to realize that he should embrace his loyal Huguenot subjects and tolerate their faith as his father had famously done with his Edict of Nantes. Then Louis could turn his full resources against the Habsburgs and do so with support from the Huguenots, the English, and the Dutch. If the English naval expedition failed, the drive toward “the new founded monarchy” of the enemy might prove irreversible and a new effusion of the blood of martyrs of the kind Cassiodorus and Brightman had written about would ensue. But the electrifying news of the assassination of the duke of Buckingham on Saturday, August 23 at Portsmouth radically altered Simonds’s calculations. He reapplied himself energetically to research for his treatise on “Great Brittaines Strengh & Weakenes” because with the duke gone, it could be hoped that “the diuine prouidence would firmelie vnite the harts of Prince and people in England now at last.”81 Here follows in the autobiography one of its longest set-pieces, a detailed twenty-six-hundredword narration of Buckingham’s death, character, and career. Strikingly, Simonds gave half of this space to the lineage, motives, and actions of the assassin, John Felton, who emerges as a heroic figure whose murder of the duke was carefully considered and justified—the deed of a pious patriot. Ever the student of family histories, Simonds pointed out that Felton came from “a verie ancient familie of gentrie in Suffolke; verie valourous & of a stout spirit.”82 By contrast, Buckingham’s “condition had been verie poore & meane but a few yeares before,” since he was “but a yonger sonne of an ordinarie familie of gentrie of which the coat-armour [coat of arms] was so meane” that they “deserted” it and bore instead “the armes of Weylond a Suffolk familie.”83 Simonds began his account with a vivid depiction of the assassination itself. He wrote that Buckingham had spent most of August busily prepar-

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ing his ships and soldiers to depart and loading supplies for themselves and for the starving Rochellais. During this period, “the Duke himselfe seemed confident” that this time he would succeed, even though Louis’s forces had “soe stronglie blocked vpp” the channel into the harbor that it “was verie probable [Buckingham] could neuer haue releiued it.” Friends reminded him “how generally hee was hated in England” and urged him to “weare some coate of maile or some other secret defensiue armour.” His jaunty response was that no armor was necessary because “ther are noe Romane Spirits left.” After breakfasting between eight and nine, he intended to ride to confer with the king at his lodging five miles away. In the midst of a throng “of many noblemen & leaders” that included his assassin, he stopped to talk to Sir Thomas Friar, one of his colonels, as he was departing from the house’s parlor. Stooping downe in taking his leaue of him, John Felton gentleman hauing watched his opportunitie, thrust a long knife with a white halft hee had secretlie about him, with great strengh & violence into his breast vnder his left papp, cutting the diaphragma & lungs & peircing the verie heart it self. The Duke hauing receiued the stroake, instantlie clapping his right hande on his sworde hilt cried out, Gods wounds the villaine hath killed mee: some report his last wordes otherwise, little differing for substance from these.

The dying royal favorite was placed on a table in the hall beneath the gallery into which his duchess and sister-in-law had rushed upon hearing the commotion. They saw “the Dukes bloud gush out abundantlie from his breast nose & mouth . . . they brake into pittiful outcries, & raised great lamentacion. Hee pulled out the knife himselfe” and died about fifteen minutes later, having been unable to speak again because of the bleeding from his mouth.84 The confusion was so great that Felton left the hall unnoticed and walked into the kitchen because everyone was “busie about the Duke.” He could easily have escaped, but instead he returned to the hall and admitted that he had been “the author of the Dukes death, before anie other appeached him for it.” Had it not been for Sir Dudley Carleton’s intervention, Felton would have “been slaine outright by some of the Dukes followers.” Felton, having anticipated just such a “sudden ende,” had written out his reasons for the deed and placed the signed paper in his hatband He asserted first, that although he asked none to “commend” him, they should “discommend themselues” for leaving Buckingham “soe long vnpunished.” Second, he wrote that “that man in my opinion is cowardlie & base & deserueth neither the name of a gentleman nor souldier that is vnwilling to sacrifice his life for the honour of God, & the good of his King & cuntrie.”85 John Felton had been a lieutenant in the naval expedition to La Ro-

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chelle in 1627, and he had also served in the same capacity during the equally unsuccessful 1625 expedition to Cadiz commanded by Viscount Wimbledon. The traditional explanation of the motive for his stabbing of Buckingham is that he was one of many officers angered because they had not received pay that was owed them. In addition, he was said to believe that he had earned a captain’s rank that had been denied him unfairly. Simonds’s relation includes these allegations and adds another one about an “ancient quarrell” between Felton and Sir Henry Hungate. Felton had “discouered” Hungate’s “secret lust” and been “wounded by him in his bedd verie dangerouslie.” Although Felton recovered from his wound, Simonds averred that Hungate, a man much in Buckingham’s favor, feared Felton and used his influence with the favorite to “depriue Mr Felton once if not twice of that captaines place of that companie” in which he had been the lieutenant. The promotion was indeed “due vnto him by the rules & lawes of the warres” because he should have had it upon the death of the captain under whom he had served. From this perspective, Felton was a beaten man whose only motive was revenge for the wrongs he thought he had suffered at the hands of the duke and his creatures. Simonds reported that this was the explanation favored by Buckingham’s allies. Felton was, in other words, motivated by personal and financial resentments rather than by religious or constitutional principles. We should remember the care with which Simonds insisted on producing evidence that contradicted his conclusions in various other contexts and not be surprised that he did so on this occasion. It is, however, quite clear that he found a quite different explanation convincing. Felton, he wrote, “euen to his death auowed the contrarie” and insisted that he acted only because of his devotion to “the publike good.” Felton had read the remonstrance that had passed the House of Commons in the 1628 session that had “branded” Buckingham “a capitall enemie to Church & state.” The prorogation of the parliament, however, prevented the members from cashiering him. Therefore Felton “had strong inward workings & resolutions to sacrifice himselfe for the safeguard of the Church & State.”86 Moreover, Simonds wrote that for at least two months before he acted, Felton struggled with himself about whether to proceed. He feared that “it might bee a temptacion of the deuils,” and he asked for divine “deliuerance from it by fasting & praier.” After the two months were up, however, “his resolucions weere still the same to accomplish it.” He concluded that God was the source of his plan and “heartilie praied for diuine assistance to finish it.” He acted entirely on his own, without any “abbettor counsellor or assistant.” His mother and sisters were imprisoned and questioned, but they knew nothing of his intention and were later freed. Simonds con-

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sidered it “most probable” that Felton had acted “with a sinceere aime of publike goode.” He based this conclusion heavily on the fact that at the very moment when “hee sheathed the knife in the Dukes breast, iust at the instant,” he asked that God would show mercy to his victim’s soul. This “plainelie shewed hee had noe priuate aimes of personall reuenge . . . but had a greater care of Buckinghams soule, then Buckingham himselfe had.”87 The preceding presentation of Simonds’s view of the assassination of Buckingham is based on what he wrote in his autobiography ten years after the event, and we have already considered examples of situations in which his views at the time of some events had changed by 1638. But his letters to Joachimi show that in this case he was thinking along these lines from the outset. For example, in his October 25, 1628, letter, he reported that when Felton was taken from Portsmouth to the Tower of London, “the prayers and applause of the people” accompanied him and “he was received benignly and mercifully.” Those who witnessed his execution saw a man not “averse to death in any way” but rather wanting it to “be accelerated, nor does he fear that he sinned in anything other than that he removed suddenly a man burning with crimes.”88 Simonds amplified his account in a January 1629 letter, relating that at Felton’s trial before the Court of King’s Bench, the assassin had confessed his guilt and received the verdict “most humbly and most piously.” On the scaffold where he was hanged, he behaved “with great patience and penitence.”89 In the autobiography, Simonds added that during Felton’s imprisonment in the Tower, clergymen who attended him made some headway in persuading him “that hee had sinned in it, because of the Apostle Paul’s rule; that wee must not doe euill, that good may come of it.” Felton admitted his sin and regretted having killed “a most wicked impenitent man soe suddenlie.” But he did not retreat from his belief that God had pardoned all of his sins “through the merits & bloud of Jesus Christ my Sauiour” and that “great good shall result to Church & Commonwealth by it.”90 Simonds’s final thoughts included a further comparison of the assassin and his victim. He reiterated his assertion that Felton’s “familie was doubtles moore noble & ancient then the Duke of Buckinghams, & his end much blesseder then the Dukes.” Although Felton was buried “obscurelie,” Buckingham was “more prodigiouslie flattered in his epitaph at Westminster church then hee had been by all his sycophants in his lifetime.” These flatterers were mostly “yong indiscreete gentlemen” who had egged him on to undertake “new & dangerous resolues,” according to Sir Robert Cotton. “What his religion was I am not able to auerre,” Simonds slyly intoned, but he asserted that the duke had been elected to the

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chancellorship of Cambridge University “by the Arminian partie” there. These theologians were “the enemies of Gods grace and prouidence” who stemmed from the Anabaptist followers of Socinianism but had become known as Arminians after the death of Arminius himself in Leiden in 1609 (himself a plagiarist of the writings of “his great master Sebastian Castellio, or out of the workes of Robert Bellarmine & other Jesuites”). Buckingham’s “priuate practice” of religion was “uerie small,” according to Simonds, and he demonstrated the point with a report of the duke’s behavior at a baptismal service. At the moment when the minister asked the congregation if “they forsoke the carnall desires of the flesh” and would neither “follow, nor bee ledd by them,” the duke had winked at “some comelie & beautifull women” who were nearby.91 This reinforced his claim that the duke “had highlie prouoked God by his extreame lust, ambition, pride, gluttonie & other sinns.”92 On October 4, 1628, Paul and Simonds left Stow Hall on their way to London for the Michaelmas term that would begin on October 9, spending two days at Dalham with the Stutevilles. Simonds recorded on October 13 the “false newes” circulated at the royal court and in the City of London “that Rochelle was relieved by our fleet; but the contrary truth was soon after known, to the ensadding and dejection of all men.”93 What he called his “short abstract of the greatest public passages of Christendom beyond the seas” during 1628 gave much attention to the catastrophe of the Huguenot cause in France and the English contribution to it. Predictably enough, the late duke received a final drubbing: “In France the Protestant cause was welneare vtterlie ruined this yeare” by the English failure at La Rochelle. The duke either bungled “purposelie to vndoe the Church ther; or . . . God cursed & blasted all the enterprises of soe irreligious & profane an instrument.” Either way, the result was the same, whatever he intended. If Buckingham “occasioned all this misery & destruction to the distressed French church purposelie, hee was the most infernall instrument that euer England bredd, & I must leaue it to the last day to reueale fullie.”94 Early in September, the fleet of 160 ships that he had prepared sailed from Portsmouth under the command of the earl of Lindsey. Inside the besieged town, the defenders and residents were literally starving in large numbers. The besiegers had reinforced their seaward position so solidly that Lindsey’s attacks failed miserably, and he returned “inglouriouslie home againe.” Late in October, the inevitable surrender occurred, and when Louis XIII came into La Rochelle he saw “soe many pale & wann faces liuing, & diuers dead famished carkases lying in euerie streete” that instead of ordering the executions of the rebels, “hee commanded bread to bee giuen them.”95 Simonds next provided a summary

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of the struggle between pro-French and pro-Spanish contenders for control of the duchy of Mantua and of the continuing woes of the Danes who were being pummeled by Wallenstein. Simonds’s account ended, however, with two pieces of heartening news. A Dutch fleet under Piet Heyn had captured the Spanish treasure fleet off Cuba and brought home “the richest and greatest prize that was ever taken by them.” It was estimated at ₤300 million. This powerful blow against Spain “began to cheare vpp the hearts of Gods children.” Moreover, in June, the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus forced Wallenstein to end his siege of Stralsund in Pom­ erania. The “name & fame” of the warlike Swede had already brought him renown among “all good men thorough Christendome” because he had issued a proclamation that “inuited all the distressed Protestants in Germanie” to come live in his country.96 On December 10, Simonds wrote from the Middle Temple to Dr. Joseph Mede (then, he thought, visiting at Dalham). He reported that the forces of that “mirrour of tyrannie the Emsperour” in northern Germany “are masters of the feild” and that they were building “manie ships dailie without anie impeachment.” The threat this represented to the English and the Dutch was too obvious to need voicing. Also, he had heard at Sir Robert Cotton’s house that discussions of a peace with Spain were under way. Simonds told Mede that it would be best if the negotiation failed, opining that “perish wee may without peace, perish wee shall most assuredlie by it.” A Jesuit, he added, had during the last week been condemned at Newgate and many had gone there “to haue seen him quartered,” but a reprieve had arrived to disappoint them (“by the queenes mediation as tis generallie thought”).97 the 1629 dissolution The year 1629 opened with a catastrophe for the international Protestant cause when on January 17, Henry Frederick, the fifteen-year-old eldest son of the Elector Palatine, drowned when his boat capsized near Amsterdam. As Simonds put it to Joachimi, the loss of “that royal youth of the highest hope struck the faces and hearts of all the faithful with tremendous sorrow” and led them “to make wet the tomb” of the young man with tears and lamentations.98 His mother, the Queen of Bohemia, had sent Simonds a holograph letter the lad had written to her on March 30, 1628, and in his autobiography he noted that he kept this original document “as a pretious monument by mee.”99 Another disaster was in the making early in 1629. Although Charles I’s original order for the prorogation of the 1628 Parliament had specified that it would recommence on October 20, further prorogations put it off until January 20, 1629. Many hoped that Buckingham’s absence from the political landscape would open a door to rap-

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prochement between the king and the MPs. In his autobiography, written after he knew the dismal outcome, Simonds simply said that it had begun dangerously because the House of Commons insisted on debating a bill about the king’s continued collection of the customs duties without statutory warrant. This could, he thought, have caused trouble, but the king had sent “a verie gratious message” on the matter. Simonds also praised the lower house’s “zeale . . . for the glorie of God & the maintenance of true Religion” against “popish ceremonies or idolatrous actions” and the preservation of “the pure doctrine” of the Church of England against “the blasphemous tenents of the Anabaptists in derogation of Gods grace.”100 It was all for naught. On February 28, Simonds rode toward Bury St Edmunds alongside one of the justices of the Court of Common Pleas who was on circuit, and they “heartily condoled the coming breach of the Parliament, and the infinite miseries that were likely to ensue upon it.” March 3 was, Simonds wrote, the most gloomie sadd & dismall day for England that happened in fiue hundred yeares space last past, the present session of Parliament being suddenlie and in a tumultuarie manner dissolued in the morning, since which time, this poore kingdome for aboue eight yeares & fiue months continuance, hath neuer yet enioied the benefit & comforte of that great counsell againe, & God onlie knowes when it shall: but the sadd effects it hath since wrought, in Church and commonwealth may moore easilie bee lamented & deplored then recounted. And it deserues the greater condolement, because the cause of the breach & dissolution was so immaterial & friuolous: in the carriage whereof diuers fierie spirits in the House of Commons weere verie faultie, & cannot bee excused.101

In Simonds’s view, the dissolution that so many blamed largely on royal insistence on the continued collection of the customs duties without parliamentary sanction was not the king’s fault. On the contrary, Charles had “most graciouslie” declared to the House of Commons that “hee did not claime the saied tonnage & poundage in anye right of his owne.” He asked only for a parliamentary statute that would confirm his right to the revenues already received and those anticipated in the future. Unfortunately, there was a cabal of “fierie spirits” in the parliament who insisted on the punishment of the officials who had earlier collected the duties without parliamentary sanction. MPs whom Simonds characterized as “the trulie pious & religious members” of the Commons “were too much swaied & carried” by the “fierie spirits.” The catastrophic result on that “fatall Monday” was the unruly session in which the zealots caused the “doore of the howse kept shutt by maine force,” thereby denying the king’s messenger the chance to perform his office and “giue notice of the intended dissolucion of the Parliament” that the king had decided upon.

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At this point, “the tumult & discontent of the whole howse was soe great” that many feared that “swordes should haue been drawen, & that forenoone haue ended in bloud.” Fortunately, “God of his goodnes, preuented that excesse,” and the MPs left the chamber in a state of “horrour, and amazement” concerning “the dismall consequence” of the session’s end. Simonds asked himself where the blame for this catastrophe should be placed, and his answer was complicated. He argued that most of the MPs “were either trulie religious or morallie honest men” who had been “misledd” by “machivillian” politicians who feigned concern for “the libertie of the commonwealth” when their real but concealed goal was “the ruine of the true religion.” Their slender ranks consisted of two sorts of men. Some were civil lawyers who knew that the ecclesiastical courts in which they made their living would have less business “the more purelie Religion weere established.” Others were “popishlie addicted spirits” who “were farre gone with the new blasphemous fancies of the Anabaptists, called by a late and friuolous name Arminians.” These crafty dissemblers recognized that the majority of members were chiefly concerned for “Gods cause” and that a settlement of the contretemps over tonnage and poundage would have restored unity between the king and his subjects and thereby doomed the advance of their own religious agenda. It consisted of “their new popish adoracions & cringes” and “ther once Pelagian now Anabaptisticall heresies & blasphemies.” They cunningly distracted the “trulie religious” men in the lower house from the compromise with the king about the customs duties that was clearly within reach and would indeed have been achieved “had the Parliament held but a few daies longer.”102 Simonds remembered the months following the dismissal of the 1629 session of parliament as a time of increasing anxiety. He noted that several MPs were imprisoned and that many merchants ceased their trading because of the dispute over the legality of the customs duties. The loss of trade meant that “the strengh & riches of the kingdome must of necessitie in time decay.” Friday, March 20 had earlier been designated a national day of “fasting & praier through the kingdome for the successe of the Parliament,” and it became instead a day that was “verie solemlie & zealouslie obserued” as people were beset by “feares & astonishments” about what the future held and engaged anxiously in an effort to avert “Gods wrath towards this kingdome for our sinns.”103 At Stow Hall, Simonds received a letter dated April 9 from a kinsman reporting on a meeting of merchants in London who had decided unanimously to stop trading in order to avoid the payment of customs duties. Meanwhile, the privy council was trying to discourage the merchants from following through on their

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intention. For example, “greate preferment” was dangled before one merchant if he paid the duties, but he refused. The letter also contained details about some of the MPs who had been arrested for their speeches in the aborted session.104 Early in May, Simonds reported to Stuteville that the detained MPs’ legal battles were continuing and that a colleague of his at the Middle Temple who had been called to the bar alongside Simonds in 1623 had “obtained a Habeas Corpus” for William Strode. Another lawyer had done the same for Sir Walter Long. Meanwhile, the merchants continued to resist efforts to persuade them to pay up.105 When Simonds later reflected on the aftermath of the episode, he added that not only had the MPs been jailed, but they had also been charged with sedition in the Court of Star Chamber. They answered that “by the ancient lawes & constant vsage of this kingdome they could not bee questioned for anie thing saied or done in Parliament but by the Parliament.” The judges in that court, led by Sir Thomas Coventry, the Lord Keeper, told the king that the issue of parliamentary privilege of free speech was “soe difficult” that all the high court judges should be consulted about the matter. Coventry understood, Simonds averred, that “the whole libertie of the subjects of England now lay at stake.” Charles “prudentlie” took Coventry’s advice and convened a meeting of the judges at Greenwich in June. Although at that meeting there were some who sought to ingratiate themselves with the king by speaking against the MPs, “the moore learned & ancient men, & most of them of knowen integritie” urged the king to withdraw the charge. “Through Gods blessing and Prouidence,” Charles acquiesced.106 The acquiescence concerning the Star Chamber indictment did not mean that the men were freed. Eliot was still incarcerated when he died in 1633, the year Long was released. Strode did not regain his freedom until January 1640. Simonds’s silence on their continued imprisonment reflected his distaste for their method of pursuing their grievance on the day of the dissolution. On March 30, 1629, Simonds drafted a letter to his wife’s kinsman, Sir Julius Caesar, the eminent civil lawyer who served as chancellor from 1606 to 1614 and as Master of the Rolls from 1614 until his death in 1636. Simonds summarized the “publike miseries” that were overwhelming the “comfort” of private life: “Religion desolated abroad, assaulted at home & blasphemed by the enemie” who say to us as the heathen did to the prophet Joel, “wheere is now ther God.” This is one of several letters he wrote during these months which demonstrate that his mood had become darker than ever before so far as political and religious developments were concerned. Citing Seneca, he wrote that “the vpshott of all miseries cann bee but Death; & if wee bee religiouslie and resoluedlie prepared,”

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then how we die matters little. “We see the Patriarkes before the law & the Saints vnder the gospell” had considered death to be “noe otherwise then the entrance into a long iournie,” and if we suffer “a violent death for a good cause” then “wee die for the truth.” Reading this letter and others he wrote in the late 1620s, we should take seriously the proposition that he genuinely feared that he would be the object of religious persecution in the near future. At this point, the biggest threat seemed to come from Habsburg armies, but he was not forgetting the domestic danger from their allies, the Arminians. Like many of his contemporaries, Simonds’s letter to Caesar shows that he was fascinated by what he called “some strange if not miraculous prophesies or predictions (choose which title yow please) out of our moore ancient and modern writers.”107 He had been reading Nennius, who had predicted that control of England would be regained by “the ancient Brittaines, & that it should depart from the Saxons.” This had, he noted, occurred first with the Norman Conquest and second with the “hereditarie succession” of Henry VIII, a king “who was descended from all the three princes of Wales.” An even “moore remarkeable prediction” came from Archdeacon Henry of Huntingdon, who, writing in the twelfth century, had predicted that the Scots would not “conquer vs or subdue vs but they should rule over vs.” Since that could happen only by way of a “peaceable . . . succession,” it seemed clear that Henry of Huntingdon had foreseen the Stuart regime that began in 1603. Simonds acknowledged that “miracles & prophesies are ordinarilie ceased, yet of an vnlimited abolishment both a tanto & a toto I read not.” Finally, he drew upon that “most holie and reuverend diuine” Thomas Brightman, who had published his massive commentary on the Apocalypse two decades earlier at a time when “the Brittish, French & Germane churches” were “most securelie flourishing.” Yet Brightman nevertheless “foretold this verie iudgment now in execution” upon them because of “the contempt of the word of God & the true professours thereof, together with the crying sinns & great excesses.” Simonds admitted that Brightman had merely been guessing about what would come, but “I tell yow certainlie O my deare mother church” that another “long & large persecution” not unlike those perpetrated by Roman emperors such as Decius and Diocletian lay ahead. However, Simonds expressed confidence that when “this storme” ended, “the most glorious and trivmphant times of peace & vnion to the Church of God following the rvine of Antichrist” would ensue. Brightman thought this triumph would come within fifty years, and if he was right, then it would occur by 1659. Simonds was twenty-seven years old when he wrote this letter to Caesar, and he did not know whether he would “liue to enioy that time” or fall victim to persecu-

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tion and “witnes the truth of the gospell by a cheerefull laying downe” of his life “in the power of Faith for that truth.”108 On April 2, Simonds wrote to Joachimi regretting that the venison he had promised to send was not yet available because both male and female deer were “insipid and unwholesome” not only during Lent but even up to the Ides of May. But he assured his friend that the deer being fattened in Suffolk would soon be on its way to him in London. He also congratulated Joachimi on the forthcoming marriage of one of his daughters. As usual in his correspondence with the Dutch ambassador, the emphasis was on the international scene and the continuing advances of the Habsburg armies. As he had in the letter to Caesar, he asked Joachimi how they could enjoy their private lives while in their homelands “intestine discords” continued and the “savage enemy . . . subverts everything abroad?” In this context, the assistance that should have gone from England to the Danes and the Swedes was vital, and it was thus the more to be regretted that the “desperate and . . . so unnecessary” dissolution of the parliament had occurred. Although more briefly, he restated many of the same points he had made to Caesar about the prophecies of Joel, Henry of Huntingdon, and Brightman. The last part of the letter consists of a series of questions about “various rumours” that were circulating in England and asked Joachimi about whether any of them had substance. One was that the Dutch government had lent ₤600,000 to Charles I in return for “the Isle of Wight and certain maritime cities” as pledges for repayment. Another was that Charles had granted to the Dutch the right to “export or import all goods either sent from there or brought thither, a double tax having been given, our merchants being prevented, in the meantime, lest they do business.”109 Writing from London on April 14, Joachimi denied that any commercial favors or islands or ports had been pledged to his nation in return for a loan and asserted that such rumors were lies circulated by malevolent men who sought to “excite in the king a hatred” toward the Dutch. Joachimi also made it clear that he agreed with Simonds’s dire assessment of the religious situation: “indeed the face of the Christian Republic is sad wherever you turn yourself, whether you look to the church or to the civil state.” Yet, he added, “amongst enemies it flourishes, & by persecutions it increases.”110 the habsburg onslaught During the summer of 1629, Simonds’s correspondence with Joachimi focused on the dangerous military situation in the Netherlands. On July 25, he wrote to thank the ambassador for his most recent missive, which was “redolent with news,” and he expressed worry over the rumors that

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Charles I appeared to be on the verge of concluding a truce with Spain.111 His next letter, probably written late in August, begins as follows: “Please turn to the better, O good God, the stupendous evils which I have just heard about, horrified as I am.” Because Simonds’s other letters to Joachimi are dated, usually with both the Julian and Gregorian days, for the receipt of the letter stated at the outset in addition to that of the reply, the absence of a date for this one may reflect the high state of alarm he was experiencing. The servant of a “neighboring soldier” who had come from Amsterdam brought shocking news of a rapid advance of two columns of Hapsburg troops, one from the west and the other from the east. Simonds’s source reported that they carried “all before them like a raging torrent” and subjected crops and villages in the central province of Gelderland to devastation “by sword and flame.” The double-pronged assault began late in July and culminated in the capture of Amersfoort in mid-August. It brought the enemy within fifteen miles of the city of Utrecht and less than fifty from Amsterdam. Knowing that this development would have been very painful to his friend, Simonds drew again on the sources (the Bible, Brightman, Eusebius, Cyprian) he had used in his previous letters to Joachimi and Caesar and added new ones as well (Hilarius, Calvin, Xenophon, Cicero, and others) in order to offer advice and comfort. Calvin, for example, taught that “God afflicts those he loves and castigates his sons,” and Brightman “who is the equal of them all, that the crown of celestial glory” is reserved for “those who fall in the fight against the beast.” Simonds ended his letter expressing hope that he was not being “too annoying to your sadness” and stating that Joachimi’s “goodness” had inspired “so great an ardor of love towards you and yours . . . that I shall cling to you in all difficulties with my counsels and faculties.”112 What Simonds (and perhaps even Joachimi) did not know until later was that this invasion of the Dutch heartland was a desperate attempt to force Frederick Henry, the prince of Orange and Dutch stadholder, to end the hard-fought siege of ‘s-Hertogenbosch that he had initiated late in April. In fact, Frederick Henry calmly called the Habsburg bluff and won the game. The Imperialists, having overextended themselves, left Amersfoort quickly after a Dutch counterattack resulted in the capture of the important fortress town of Wesel on the Rhine to the east. Simonds described the capture of Wesel as miraculous in his next letter. These Habsburg losses were followed by the surrender of ‘s-Hertogenbosch in September. According to Jonathan Israel, “the double loss of Wesel and ‘s-Hertogenbosch represented the first really large-scale Spanish defeat in Europe since the scattering of the Armada of 1588,” and delivered “a

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shattering blow to Spanish prestige.”113 The sudden change of fortunes would prove irreversible. Frederick Henry took swift advantage of the redirection of Madrid’s resources toward the Mantuan war just as Swedish help was arriving and beginning to turn the tide against Vienna in the north. The Thirty Years’ War was far from over, but the long years of steady Habsburg advance had finally ended. At this point, to be sure, Simonds could not know that a corner had been turned. He bemoaned the fact that little could be “hoped for amongst us” until a new parliament was constituted in England that would “come to the aid of the king with a subsidizing gift.”114 During the fraught summer of 1629, he retained the frail hope that the ravaged English body politic could be healed, the nation reunited, and the Calvinist Church of England sustained. Simonds’s next letter to Joachimi on September 29, 1629, opened by thanking his friend for “so great and elegant an account of the affairs pertaining to war of almost the whole Christian world.” By this time Simonds knew of the capture of ‘s-Hertogenbosch as well, and he recognized how important this was for the Dutch and the Protestant cause. He was delighted that it had triggered the flight of the Archduchess Isabella from Brussels because of fears for her safety. Simonds claimed that there was “no mortal who thirsts more breathlessly for a prosperous Church” or who applauds “the doings of the patriots” in the United Provinces “with a more burning desire” than himself. He suggested that the Dutch urge Charles I to consider that an attack upon “the Spaniard in America would be most beneficial.” Spanish supply lines there were thinly stretched over long distances, and “thus the wealth to be sent to Spain may be either intercepted or detained there.” Harking back to the Elizabethan era, he reminded Joachimi that the earl of Essex had then proposed just such a campaign, but Lord Burghley, “somewhat unfriendly to the United Provinces,” had opposed it “slyly” shortly before he advocated peace with Spain while his son and political heir Robert engineered the overthrow of Essex. Simonds argued that American gold and silver enabled Spain to continue to afford her army in the Netherlands and that it was time to revisit the notion of an effort to deny Madrid American revenue by intervening there forcibly. Begging Joachimi to forgive him for “babbling” about such high matters, he urged his friend to recognize that he had “a mind sincere here, towards England, now my native land, and towards my compatriots . . . from the United Provinces.” Echoing themes in earlier letters, he stated that if either the Dutch or the English had to lose, it was better to “perish seeing and fighting rather than blind and preoccupied; an unbloody victory is always most inglorious to the conquered.”115 Simonds reiterated his persistent concern for warm and close relations between En-

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gland and the United Provinces in his November 15 letter to Joachimi. He denounced those among his countrymen who not only favored peace with Spain but kept bringing up what he called “that unhappy business at Amboyna” in order to stigmatize the Dutch. In February 1623 at Amboina, one of the “Spice Islands” that the Dutch had taken from the Portuguese, ten English traders were arrested, charged with plotting against the Dutch forces, and beheaded. This “massacre” outraged English opinion, and Simonds told Joachimi that he had defended the Dutch government by arguing that it had condemned the deed as “an execrable crime” and arrested the perpetrators. He had not, however, discovered what had been done with them and asked if Joachimi could inform him of the outcome. In his view, the Dutch authorities “are confederates of this monarchy and keep watch over the same common religion and liberty with us.” No less important, their continuing fight against Spain made them “the walls by which we escape” from “a great enemy.”116 the habsburg retreat Simonds’s customary year-end review of the international scene in his autobiography opened by mentioning that much of what he knew about events abroad he had “learned out of the elegant latine letters of my deare freind, Sir Albertus Joachimi, . . . which I receiued sometimes weekelie from him.” Simonds observed at the outset that “it is almost incredible how the warre in Italie altered the face & condition of the whole affaires of Christendome” and brought on a “great reuiuing & recomforting of Gods church & children.” He understood that the financial and military resources the Spaniards had diverted toward northern Italy had enabled the Dutch to break out of Spanish encirclement in 1629, and he took great pleasure in recounting the way in which even their efforts in Italy had failed. He also relished the telling of the long hoped for awakening of Louis XIII from “those slumbers & distempers” that “his owne vnnaturall mother & pensionarie false councellors had thus long amused him in.” At last, Louis started to see that the real enemies of France were not the Huguenots but the Habsburgs in Madrid, Vienna, and Brussels. Louis thus began to move against them with greater success than any French king in an entire century. At the same time, he made peace with England and granted to the Huguenots “free libertie for the profession of the reformed Religion,” thereby returning to the admirable religious policies of his late and by Simonds much lamented father, Henry IV. Louis thereby forced Ferdinand II, “the bloudie emperour of Germany,” to return Holstein and Jutland to Christian IV and make peace with him. When 1629 opened, both Christian IV and the Huguenots had lain “at the mercie of ther ene-

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mies” and seemed beyond help from any source. This was precisely the moment, Simonds opined, that God made “our extremitie his opportunitie” and delivered them both by means of the Italian war.117 Farther east, the war between Poland and Sweden ended with a peace treaty that freed Sweden to consider intervention on the French side against Ferdinand II. Meanwhile, the United Provinces, which had been “in great jeopardie this summer,” saw God bring about “seuerall wonders for ther deliuerance.” One of these occurred when the defenders of ‘s-Hertogenbosch came within minutes of raising the siege by cutting a dike in order to drown the besiegers in their trenches. Just in time, “a braue Scottish sergeant with some twentie foure moore with him . . . discharged ther muskets” and saved the siege by bringing in the Dutch cavalry at a moment when the enemy lacked “but halfe a foote of the bottome next the water to haue let in.” Soon after, the divinely directed Dutch seizure of Wesel so dispirited the Spaniards behind the walls of ‘s-Hertogenbosch that they surrendered. Yet another “strange passage of Gods prouidence” for the Dutch was the result of Ferdinand’s peace treaty with Christian IV, because it released a huge number of soldiers to join the defence of the Dutch heartland “at the verie instant they needed them, as if they had been sent by miracle from heauen.”118 Having moved from Stowlangtoft to Islington late in 1629, Simonds wrote to Stuteville on February 17, 1630. He mentioned that he was concerned about “the planett which . . . appeares now in our horizon,” which might presage “fearefull” portents. If Stuteville was not aware of it, he could at the upcoming assizes consult Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston because Simonds had shown him the comet recently. Turning to foreign news, he expressed hope that “the now burning dissensions of the two houses of Austria & Bourbon” would grow even hotter and strengthen the French response. “It is high time the flowre de lices may stopp the eagles ravening,” especially because Ferdinand II was plotting to bring in not only Spanish but German forces to “invade France, Sweden & Holland & all at the beginning of this spring.” At the same time, he reported that Joachimi had told him that the Dutch were staggered by the enormous cost of the 1629 campaigns at the same time that they were “much weakened by the growing impudence of the Arminian heresie.”119 Three weeks later, in another letter to Stuteville, Simonds reported that Joachimi had visited him at Islington and proffered that the rumors of an English peace “with Spain is rather boasted of by them, then feared by him,” and that French prospects in the Mantuan war against the Habsburgs were excellent because of the strength of the French army and Ferdinand’s distractions.120 During the summer of 1630, Simonds was paying close attention to the

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beginning of the Dutch attempts to seize Brazil from the Spanish and Portuguese and to establish strong bases in the Caribbean as well.121 This is not to say that he did not keep up with events in Europe. On July 30, Stuteville wrote to Simonds with news about the struggle between French and Habsburg forces in northern Italy, but the letter exemplifies the difficulty of obtaining certainty in such matters. Sir William Spring had told Stuteville that the French had routed the great Spinola’s army, but soon after Joseph Mede showed him a letter from an English gentleman in Turin who said that the French were on the verge of losing the gains they had made the previous year. Mede was in fact residing with the Stutevilles at Dalham, having fled Cambridge because the plague was raging there.122 A week later, Simonds wrote to Sir Martin with what he called “some extraordinarie avisoes” he had from Joachimi about “the King of Swedens peircing into the bowels of Pomerland [Pomerania] with a goodlie armie.” He also had “a hott report of the arrivall of the Spanish fleete,” but Joachimi doubted it. What was certain, however, was what Simonds called “the violent encreasing of that grace-disgracing heresie [Arminianism] in the Lowcuntries . . . Amsterdam & Dort wheere the synode it selfe are whollie for it, & some violent proceeding against the orthodox partie . . . is daylie feared.” For Joachimi, Stuteville, and D’Ewes, this was deeply disturbing on both theological and political grounds. Simonds wrote that according to “the most iudicious” sources, the prince of Orange supported the Arminians, whereas “the most charitable [say] that hee feares them.”123 On August 14, Stuteville, still hosting Dr. Mede, reported more bad news Mede had obtained. The annual Spanish treasure fleet had arrived heavily laden with precious metals, and this would enable the enemy to “plott new combustions in Europe.” In addition, “our late transported planters into New England” had encountered stormy seas during their voyage, and many had died alongside cattle they had taken with them. If this proved accurate, it would “much discorage” further settlement there.124 Simonds’s next letter to Stuteville (September 16) relayed information that he had gleaned while dining with Joachimi at his new residence in Chelsea and that he thought would “satisfie your owne & Mr Meades expectacion.” Things had, Simonds told Sir Martin, changed little in Italy “since the last printed coranto.” Apparently not yet in print, however, was news of Gustavus Adolphus’s activities in Pomerania. The Swedish king was busy taking castles still held by Imperial garrisons there and had narrowly escaped no less than three ambushes planned by the enemy. “Yow may wonder as I did how these ambushes suffered him to liue . . . but it is most probable . . . the restraining hand of a higher power” was involved in order to save him “to a better end.” Moreover, “his victorious proceed-

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ings haue caused the Magdeburgers to expell the Emperors Archbishopp with his troupes of Monkes & Iesuites.” D’Ewes closed with a request that Stuteville “lay vpp my letter & lett your clarke onlie write out the newes that soe none to whome yow communicate it may see my hand or name.” This may mean that he wanted to make sure that nothing could be traced back through him to Joachimi.125 Simonds described the letter he wrote to Stuteville on October 6 as shorter than its predecessor but “moore remarkeable & exoticke.” The Imperial diet of the Holy Roman Empire, which he would have expected to oppose “the Swedish designes” had, astonishingly, done quite the opposite by asserting “ther dislike of the insolences & greatnes” of the emperor’s commander, Count Wallenstein. Also welcome from Simonds’s viewpoint was the fact that Spanish attacks on Dutch towns had failed and the peace negotiations between those parties had come to “a happie stop.”126 In his next letter, a fortnight later, Simonds turned back toward lamentation: “For forraine newes I could sitt downe with teares & blott this page to tell yow . . . [of] the desolation of the present Church of France.” The Huguenots’ fortified towns such as Montaubon and La Rochelle had been razed, and they had “noe other guard or safetie left but faith & Patience.”127 Simonds apologized for the long interval before his next letter (written from Islington on November 23), explaining that the bad weather (“the foulenes of the wayes”) had prevented him from riding to Chelsea to visit Joachimi. “The greatest nouelties” he could report came from the royal court in France because of the power struggle between Richelieu and Marie de Medici, the queen mother. There was indeed “much suspence whoe shall reape the finall glorie of the day.” Those whom Simonds called “the wisest” opined “that the Cardinall is trulie the Kings, a louer of the libertie of France & an enemy of the Jesuites.” Richelieu was perceived as sympathetic to the Huguenots and for that reason was “much hated of the moore furious papists for the prolonging of the warre of Italie.” He possessed a force of guards “not inferior to the Kings” and went through only the “goodliest streetes of Paris” surrounded by his men to avoid assassination. Despite these measures, some thought that “the Queene mothers implacabilitie will bee his ruine.”128 In 1630, Simonds could not know that Richelieu would carry the day and shape French policy for the rest of his life in a direction that favored the wider Protestant cause and resisted the papalists. Simonds’s reflection on 1630 was apt, succinct, and optimistic: “The public frame of things & affaires in Christendome beyond the seas gave all Gods children dailie moore and moore cause of reioicing and thankefulnes.” The despairing mood he had maintained up through 1628 and

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only begun to modify in 1629 disappeared entirely in 1630. He wrote of French successes in Italy against the Hapsburgs and Louis XIII’s shrewd decision to defend France by giving Ferdinand “some worke at home.” Louis’s first step was to ask the king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus “(whome the Emperour had highlie provoked by many hostilities & in­ iuries) to ioine his armes with him for the Restitucion of the Germane libertie.” The English ambassador to Sweden, Sir Thomas Roe, convinced Gustavus Adolphus “to undertake soe pious and braue an enterprise: which hee did, & ioined in league with the French King.” The army of fifteen thousand men he took into the field included “manie great souldiers & commanders of the braue and warlike Scottish nation.” This force, although small, had by the end of the year taken control of the duchy of Pomerania, expelling from it the Imperialist “wolues & robbers” and “wrought so many wonders” that it “filled the whole Christian world with admiration.” Indeed, Simonds wrote, Gustavus’s achievements “might affoord mee worke for manie pages, were not his full storie extant in latine French and English.” In addition, Dutch victories in Brazil and elsewhere buttressed the progress of Protestantism. Even in the Empire, Duke John George of Saxony showed signs of acting “for the cause of religion,” although he later “plaied the Judas to ruine the Empire” as he had once before in 1621 by deserting “the gospell and religion in Germanie.”129 In any case, on many fronts the events of 1629 and 1630 indicated that at last key developments that Simonds had been hoping for were indeed occurring and that his worst fears of a complete overthrow of Protestantism by the Habsburg juggernaut would not come to pass. The outcome was still in doubt, but at least there was finally reason for optimism. Ironically, the welcome prominence of the Swedish king in the reviving fortunes of the Protestant cause triggered a rare quarrel between Simonds and his dear friend Stuteville. The first mention of Gustavus Adolphus in Simonds’s correspondence had occurred in 1628 when he mentioned to Stuteville “a meere report that the King of Sweden hath made his peace with the Pole, & will or cann assist the Danes.” In other words, God, through his “secret” providences, might yet pull his chestnuts out of the fire and the Swedes might be his instrument.130 By 1631, Breitenfeld demonstrated that God had indeed acted powerfully with Gustavus Adolphus as his agent. This was to sweep under the rug a sharp argument he had had early in 1631 with Stuteville, who had written to tease D’Ewes about his characterization of the Swedish king as “the man of yor praiers” when he was in fact a Lutheran, a group D’Ewes had described as “graceless hereticks,” meaning neo-Pelagians and in effect Arminians.131 Stung, D’Ewes shot back that he had been “not a little grieved at some passages”

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in Stuteville’s letter, and in particular he thought that his friend had “given the good name of the King of Sweden a deeper wound in calling him a Lutheran then his enemies have given his person.” D’Ewes then admitted that he had feared that Gustavus was a Lutheran, but that he had spoken with Sir Henry St. George, the knight who had taken the Garter to Gustavus from Charles I, about the matter and become convinced that the courageous Swede was “the onlie defender of Gods true and small flocke left.” D’Ewes also objected to Stuteville’s statement that all Lutherans held “the Arminian tenets” when it was clear from Luther’s treatise on Galatians that Luther himself was orthodox about “justification by faith (not foreseen).”132 Only later had some of Luther’s successors in Germany fallen prey to the Pelagian/Arminian/Anabaptist heresy and thereby become “pseudo-Lutherans” who deviated from the purity of Luther’s thought. Stuteville responded that his friend had misunderstood him, that he had said what he had said only “in merriment,” and that he was horrified that D’Ewes had taken it so seriously.133 D’Ewes then backtracked and conceded that “our differences in opinion may well bring knowledge by ventilation . . . . God be praised wee yet both live . . . in that commonwealth wheere the main streame runns with and for the truth.”134 Both men’s letters thereafter returned to their fervid newsmongering, the unpleasantness being consigned to oblivion. When he wrote his autobiography, D’Ewes remembered Gustavus as “that mirroir of Princes,” the hero whose victories had given such great comfort to the godly.135

The Antiquarian and Collector Although Simonds D’Ewes certainly devoted many hours to his work as a “Novellor,” much of his time after he married and left the Middle Temple went into his scholarly pursuits of collecting books and manuscripts for his library and doing historical, genealogical, antiquarian, and numismatic research. He was fully aware of the tension between his newsgathering and his collecting of information for his writing projects. In one of his newsy letters to Stuteville, he mentioned that Sir Martin was “the first & onlie freind” to whom he wrote such letters because his “manye preparations for the publike good scarce giue mee a breathing time.”136 As the projected treatise on “Great Brittaines Strengh and Weakenes” that he undertook in May 1628 showed, some of his historical digging found its way into what he intended as a tract for the times that he found himself unable to finish until after the moment had passed. This continued to be the case with respect to such topics as the rise of Arminianism, a subject that led Simonds to pay much attention to religion as he worked on his history of Britain from the earliest times through the Norman Conquest.

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He was reading for this in September 1626 before his marriage to Anne Clopton late in October, and in November when residing at Albury Lodge with Anne, her grandmother, and the Brograves, he had returned to his note-taking on the reign of William the Conqueror. He devoted much of December to the religion of the “ancient Brittons.”137 An early result of this inquiry appeared in his anguished February 1628 letter to Stuteville, “written in teares not inke,” about the advance of Pelagianism and comparing their present situation with what Gildas and Nennius had faced (discussed in the first section of this chapter). Since at this same time Simonds was also writing his elaborate “Indications” of salvation, it is clear that his marriage and his abandonment of a legal career did nothing to diminish his inherent studiousness, his love of history, or his desire to write things that would benefit the reading public. As a young barrister, his indefatigable preparation for moots had resulted in verbal exchanges with his teachers and fellow students. After 1626, his scholarly energy went more toward the works he hoped to write, and he conducted his efforts in solitude rather than the intensely social milieu of the Middle Temple. Whereas before he had relied heavily on books and manuscripts borrowed from Cotton’s library, now he could greatly expand his own library and work with materials that he owned. buying manuscripts and books Because Simonds had begun buying books as a student in Cambridge, transcribing documents in the Tower and elsewhere, and observing the collecting methods of his mentor, Cotton, he was no neophyte in the community of bibliophiles. What he described as his “first significant purchase of manuscripts” had occurred in the winter of 1624–25 when he obtained some twenty volumes from the library of a Yorkshire gentleman, Henry Savile of Banke. This purchase was soon followed by at least fifteen volumes from the estate of John Dee (1527–1609), the famous mathematician, astrologer, and antiquary whose enormous library was one of the most important of the era in England.138 Then in October 1628, Ralph Starkey died. Starkey had lived in Bloomsbury, just a short walk from the Middle Temple, and Simonds wrote that Starkey had “gathered together manye olde deedes & some old Manuscripts & coines.” But a substantial part of Starkey’s collection consisted of papers from the sixteenth century, including “diuers originall letters of great moment” such as those of Elizabeth I’s secretary and spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham. Simonds did not like Starkey and described him as “an ignorant mercenarie indigent man.” Nevertheless he recognized that Starkey’s collection was one that he “might not perhaps light of againe in many yeares, if I missed this.” As

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he knew, other collectors were eager to acquire the Starkey hoard, but he succeeded. He agreed to pay £140 over five years, and he moved the material to his chamber in the Middle Temple. Some buyer’s remorse ensued; he spent the last two months of 1628 sorting through his purchase, and he lamented that he “neuer spent soe manie weekes moore laboriouslie, & less profitable.”139 He did not complete his troll through Starkey’s papers until late in January 1629, at which time he obtained “vpon exchange” more “rare originall letters” written by Elizabethan privy councillors such as Walsingham and the earl of Leicester.140 It is likely that when in his draft introduction to “Great Brittaines Strengh and Weakenes” he cited a letter by Walsingham written on November 1, 1572, about Philip II of Spain’s ambition to conquer other countries with help from Rome, he was looking at a document obtained from Starkey’s library.141 It also contained papers from John Stow and John Dee. Andrew Watson noticed that Simonds’s speeches in the Long Parliament “often quote former Starkey manuscripts as his authority.”142 Watson estimated that D’Ewes’s library ultimately contained 7,800 medieval charters and 563 rolls. It also held about 1,000 printed books (about the same number as the Cambridge University library in 1649). An important point that Watson made must be kept in mind: the D’Ewes library “was a working library and not that of a pure bibliophile.”143 the history of britain Surely the most ambitious writing project Simonds attempted, at least before he began his parliamentary journals, was his history of Britain, and he left in Harley MS 593 some intriguing insights into how he intended to approach his subject. Folio 13r in this volume is a draft version of his title page, and his title was “Bruto-Redivivus or Brittaines true Bruto in parte discovered Together with an abstracted veiw of Brittaines Storie till the Norman Conquest.” On the next few folios he wrote parts of what he called a “Prolegomena” [sic] or introduction to the book, and the earliest sentences in it suggest that it would be—or at least that he thought it would be—thoroughly iconoclastic. The Bible provided, he asserted, “the onlie true fountaines out of which wee may draw the vndoubted Histories of the first times,” by which he meant not only before Noah’s flood but centuries after that famous expression of divine anger. All documentation other than the Christian scriptures had “perished through the iniquity of the times,” and of all ancient peoples, only “the Jewish tribes” possessed reliable knowledge of “ther first originall” (meaning their origins and early history). The various neighbors of the Jews had only what little information the Old Testament contained about their histories, and with-

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out that it would be impossible “to frame one line of probable storie” for more than two thousand years about “the histories of all the nations in the world.” This absence of data affected even “the stories both of the Greekes and Latines” about whom nothing reliable survived until more than two millennia after the Flood; therefore, as the ancient Roman scholar Varro had argued, most of what was alleged for their histories was “meerlie vncertaine fabulous & groundles.”144 Simonds thought he could go even further than Varro and insist that those who would claim otherwise about the Greeks and Romans were in error. Many writers thought that the advent of Christianity improved the situation somewhat because the Bible explained that the offspring of Noah’s third son, Japhet, were “the peoplers of most partes of the westerne world.” Simonds was skeptical, pointing out that this assumption about Japhet’s paternity of Europeans “is altogether omitted by Moses himselfe.” Unfortunately, too many had refused to acknowledge the limits of human knowledge in these matters. It had instead “been the vnhappie vanitie of all nations & soe consequentlie of the Brittaines to frame strang[e] and impossible relations of ther owne beginning & first peopleing.” Simonds heaped scorn on what he called “the inconsiderate rashnes of our brittish or Norman or English writers” because they had set “downe certainties (impossible to bee discouered but by revelation) to enlarg the glorie of ther nation.” His marginal note here listed such writers as Geoffrey of Monmouth, Henry of Huntingdon, Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales), and others upon whom the medieval understanding of Britain’s origins had been built. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story was that a descendant of King Aeneas of Troy, Brutus, had after a long journey found his way to the British isles. With his followers, he defeated Gogmagog and some other giants they found there and founded Britain. Simonds criticized Geoffrey and the other supporters of this “British history” for treating mere speculations as facts. By doing so, they had “much blemished ther owne worth” and written tales that were “ridiculous fancies to the trulie iudicious.”145 To support his position, Simonds referred his reader to William Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent (1576). Lambarde’s book was the first history of an English county, and “Judicious Lambert,” as Simonds called him, eschewed anything before the Anglo-Saxon era and drew from the Domesday Book, royal charters, and the other kinds of sources that Simonds had immersed himself in ever since his first revelatory visit to the Tower of London in 1623. In this draft he did not quote Lambarde, but what he almost certainly had in mind was the Kentishman’s statement that there was “hardly any wryter of the auncient hystorie of any nation”

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whose story mixed “his propre vanities mired with sincere veritie: the part of a wise Reader shalbe . . . with the fire and fan of iudgement and discretion, to trie and sift them a sunder.” More specifically, on another page Simonds listed in his margin, Lambarde wrote of Rochester that its boosters in order “to aduance the estimation of this Citie” had asserted that Julius Caesar himself had ordered the construction of Rochester castle. Lambarde, however, reported that he could not find in “Caesars own Commentaries, or in any other credible Hystorie” any support for this whatever. Given the lack of documentary evidence, he preferred to “vse honest silence, then rashe speache” and “preferre plaine . . . ignorance, before vaine lying and presumptuous arrogance.”146 This should remind us of Simonds’s disdain for the local legend concerning the origin of the name of his father’s manor of Stowlangtoft in Suffolk. Like Lambarde, Simonds distrusted stories based on local traditions that could not be confirmed from unimpeachable sources. Simonds’s next section in his draft poured cold water on many of the claims that had been made by various writers about the “first peopling of this island.” He rejected the suggestions that “thirtie daughters of Dioclesian” had landed in England; that Japhet’s sixth son “Meschech” arrived 152 years after the Flood; that one “Albion” who was “the great granchilde of Cham” came 335 years after the Flood and conquered “the posteritie of cursed Cham”; and that “the exiled Brute & his resolute followers” landed 1,231 years after the Flood. This “Brute,” or Brutus, was a great-grandson of Aeneas, the heroic defender of Troy and the subject of Vergil’s Aeneid. For this last and particularly popular notion and other stories associated with it, which had received support from Nennius, Henry of Huntingdon, Giraldus Cambrensis, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, according to the marginal notes, Simonds declared them “all to bee beyond the beliefe of anye sound iudgment.” Among them, he mentioned the story that Brutus and his allies found the British isles uninhabited except for a race of “gigantiue people” whom they destroyed and thereby cleared the way for populating “this Island with Troian offspring.” He acknowledged that many of “these fables” had “ancient witnesses for ther warrant,” among whom “the cheifest propp” was Geoffrey of Monmouth, the bishop of St. Asaph (d. 1154/55). Some who doubted it identified Geoffrey as “the inventor of this new fable.”147 Simonds, however, argued that Geoffrey had merely translated into Latin “a most ancient storie or chronicle in the Brittish toung” and was thus “not the first author and inventer but onlie the Translater of the Brittish storie.” He thought it unlikely that Geoffrey had believed it true, “though I suppose hee was much taken with the antiquitie of it.”148

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All of that said, however, Simonds did not go so far as to assert that everything in the accounts of Geoffrey and the others had no basis in fact. The difficulty was to separate the valid kernel from the dubious and at times absurd chaff that had been added to it by credulous writers. He noted that Lambarde, “that mirroir of learning & antiquity in his time,” accepted the story of “Brute & his Trojans landing heere.” The same held for the writings of “that thrice learned knight Sr John Prise” (1502?–55), who had exposed “the vaine errors and slanderous taunts of that boasting Italian” Polydore Vergil by discovering texts that long preceded Geoffrey of Monmouth’s time and confirmed that Brutus and his Trojans had indeed come to Britain. Whatever his reservations about the precision with which the date of Brutus’s arrival could be established and about the presence of giants in the land and other tall tales, Simonds did not doubt that Brutus had indeed reached Britain and become the source of its people and its name. To these documents, Simonds added “a most ancient coppie of Nennius” that he had read in Sir Robert Cotton’s library. From this source it was clear that in the ninth century, when Nennius had lived, the “peopling” of “this Island” by Brutus and his men had been “the receaued tradition.” To this he added a sixth-century source—“the old English rimes or verses of one Ambrose Thuliessen [Taliesin] an ancient Welsh Barde or Pryduide”—that spoke clearly of the Trojan arrival.149 Simonds therefore postulated that the older texts that had provided Geoffrey of Monmouth with the valid part of his book which concerned Brutus’s arrival in England had been drafted either “by some politick Pryduide or Barde or other ancient Brittaine” or perhaps from several such men, “each adding to others after the Romane eagle was banished from hence by the Saxon power.” The bogus additions, some of them drawn from Roman sources, represented the understandable result of the desire of the Britons “to make their originall moore glorious” by deriving it from the very Romans who had conquered them. Since, before they learned the “hapie skill” of writing from the Romans, the Britons had told each other their “traditionall storie . . . by ther toungs in verses,” and it picked up “much addition and adulteration” along the way before finally being written down. Hence the earliest extant text that confirmed the Trojan invasion—the “rime” of Taliesin—had been written “not onlie after the romane but near an hundred yeares after the Saxon conquest.”150 Simonds thought that it was “a meere fiction never dreamt of till the Romane conquest” that Brutus was descended from Aeneas the Trojan. The complete absence of evidence for such a notion in the writings of Roman historians cast “great suspicion” upon “this vanitie.” Furthermore, none of the ancient Britons had so much as heard of the landing of Aeneas in Italy after

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the Trojan War until after Caesar’s conquest of England and the long Roman occupation. Simonds therefore concluded that “our true Brute, was both setled heere & this Island fullie knowen” by the name derived from him before the Trojan War ended.151 One reason he took this view was that he believed that when the Romans arrived in England, “ther was no setled goverment, nor politicke lawes, but much superstition barbarisme and ignorance, manye rulers & those electiue or rather by force & tyrannie; not by anye lawfull & hereditarie succession.” Simonds thus seems to have anticipated Thomas Hobbes’s famous argument that in the state of nature human life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Simonds judged that the Roman conquest caused the Britons to lose “ther barbarous freedome” and “gaine a civilizd subjection” that had the added benefit of a four-century period of intermarriage between Romans and Britons.152 The next several folios in Harley MS. 593 have notes on various aspects of British history that Simonds made in the hope that he would eventually find the leisure to write his history of England to 1066. It is clear from his autobiography that during the early years of his marriage, Simonds continued to keep many irons in the fire when it came to research projects. As indicated above, he began his transcription of what he had thought was Nennius’s “Brittish Historie” while also studying various “historical antiquities” in March 1628.153 On June 23, while Anne was in Hertfordshire, he was told that his sister Jone was extremely sick. At three in the morning he left for Surrey, and he “uerily feared to haue come to her buriall.” Upon reaching the Ellyotts’ home that night after riding sixty miles, he found her “soe well recouered & merrie” that the mistaken news had brought her the pleasure of seeing him. It turned out that a different Lady Elliott had in fact died, but it was not Jone. Simonds remained at Busbridge for a few days and read and took notes from three sources: Seneca’s epistles; a work on divine government by the fifth-century church father Salvianus Massiliensis; and an English translation of the French Calvinist leader Philip Mornay’s “most iudicious” book against “the Romish mass.” In July he was studying several of Xenophon’s works, and by August he had moved on to a history of the Netherlands in Latin by Emmanuel van Meteren.154 Early in the autumn he was perusing “the Spanish history” in English and the Latin “stories” (that is, histories of England) by the twelfth-century monks William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon. By late in January 1629, he was back at the Tower of London transcribing documents from what he called the “forraigne Roules.”155 On February 17, he delighted in finding his great-grandfather Adrian’s will in the records of the London archdeaconry.156 In March 1629, he initiated his important study of the parliaments of

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Elizabeth I. This eventually led to the publication of a large folio volume put through the press in 1682 by his nephew, Paul Bowes, as The Journals of all the Parliaments during the Reign of Elizabeth I. When Simonds wrote his preface to his edition of the journals of Elizabeth I’s parliaments on February 3, 1631, he there listed among his other planned books a history of Britain “from the first Inhabitants to the present Times.”157 Thus he appears to have decided that his history of England would be lengthened to cover postconquest events as well. Work on this ambitious edition, much of the time requiring the services of an assistant whom Simonds hired and directed, continued over the next two years. During the spring of 1629, when he was often in the Tower, Simonds gratefully acknowledged that “the most free vse” of the relevant manuscript journals had been granted to him by Henry Elsyng and John Wright, the clerks of the Lords and Commons, respectively. To such sources he added “manye speeches & other passages, which I had in other priuate Journalls in MS, and in loose papers.” Simonds was pleased with and proud of the “three goodlie & inestimable (if I may soe speake) volumes in folio, being of admirable vse in many wayes.”158 In the preface, he made his admiration of Queen Elizabeth apparent. He praised “the admirable wisdom of her Majesty and this her Great Council in the happy quenching” of the many threats and dangers that emerged. He laid particular emphasis on “their timely provision against the ambitious Spaniard, the restless and irreconcileable Enemy of her Majesties Religion, Person and Realms.”159 The preface also contains the list of additional books he intended to publish “for the publick good.” First came his “general History of Great Britain,” and the second project was a “Survey of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire, out of Records or Original Deeds.” The third was a book on “the Antiquity of the Municipal or Common Laws of the Realm before the Norman Conquest.” This one would have, he hoped, a “second part out of the Itinerant and Plea Rolls” that he had been studying in the documents at Westminster.160 Except for the journals of the Elizabethan parliaments, he completed none of these tasks. At the end of his preface, Simonds admitted that the various small and large works “as well Theological as Moral” that he intended to write were like “him that shoots at the Sun, not in hopes to reach it, but to shoot as high” as “his strength, art or skill will permit.” He acknowledged that he could not possibly complete all of them during this “short and incertain Life.” His “unavoidable imployments and cares” related to his “Estate and Family” would, he knew, distract him from his research and writing. He concluded, nevertheless, that if he could “finish but a little in each kind,” perhaps other hands would take up the tasks and expand them.161 As we shall see, the time and money he poured into the expan-

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sion of his library owed much to his expectation that it would become a valuable resource for future writers, just as Sir Robert Cotton’s library had served him and many others. Because Simonds and his wife oscillated between London and various places in the country, the venue for his researches changed frequently as well. What must be emphasized is that he kept at his various studies wherever he happened to be. For example, he and Anne went to visit his father and their kin at the house of Paul’s sister at Upminster in Essex on May 29, 1629. He, who always referred to her as “Aunt Lathum,” recorded that they “receaued verie kinde & heartie entertainment” there, but that the time there “I lost not, but gathered some particulars out of certaine notes I had of the Chart-roles of King John” in the Tower. Back in London during the summer term, he made visits to the clerk of the House of Lords in his office and “ther pervsed the originall bookes” while also continuing to supervise his amanuensis’s work on the Elizabethan parliamentary papers.162 Early in August they visited Ann’s ancestral home, Lutons Hall in Long Melford, Suffolk, where he examined “diuers ancient writings & euidences touching the Cloptons.” He gleaned genealogical details about them and the illustrious families of Belhous, Knyvet, and Chastelyn from whom Anne was descended. He took great satisfaction that he “much perfected those descents,” although there was more work to do before he could pronounce them complete.163 Much of the rest of the year went into the Elizabethan parliaments, as did most of April and May 1630. But during that spring, he was also working on his transcription of the Fleta manuscript he had borrowed from Sir Robert Cotton. On May 7 at the Tower he saw the two manuscript volumes of the Domesday Book that had been compiled during William the Conqueror’s reign and took notes on them.164 By the summer, he and Anne were in Islington where he toiled away on three projects: the Fleta transcription, the Elizabethan parliaments, and the history of the branches of the noble Basset family who were among her ancestors.165 On July 12, 1630, he had the first of several visits with the famous legal scholar and antiquarian Sir Henry Spelman. Simonds had, as he put it, “much discourse touching our mutuall studies of Antiquities” with this “learned and studious gentleman, now verie aged and almost blinde.” In August, he was also reading “the Turkish Historie, observing manie memorable passages in it.”166 Much of November and December were taken up with the Fleta. On December 4, he finished transcribing the fourth of its six books. He decided that although it contained “manye excellent historicall particulars” for his purposes, he could not afford to spend more time on it. He described the 252 folio sheets in his own hand as “a volume bigg enough of it selfe to skare a Lazie man

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from reading it” and turned the copying of the rest over to a scribe. The result he had “bound all vpp together, which made a large & a faire Manuscript amongst others in my librarie.”167 He spent the rest of December 1630 transcribing parts of the chronicles of the Northamptonshire abbey at Pipwell, studying notes and abstracts from the plea rolls of King John as well as “original Deedes in the Office of armes on St Peters Hill.” 168 Deeds and other documents concerning property always fascinated him because they could help him find missing links in his genealogical charts. He would later begin yet another demanding project, his proposed Anglo-Saxon dictionary. Clearly, Sir Simonds D’Ewes was the opposite of “a Lazie man.” No less clearly, he repeatedly bit off more than he could chew and consequently failed to complete many of the tasks he set himself.

The Young Husband The heavy workload involving countless hours of research, correspondence, and composition that Simonds D’Ewes carried might suggest that he must have been a near recluse merely to have had enough time to cover so many sheets of paper with words from his hyperactive pen. However, a careful reading of his autobiography and correspondence demonstrates that he also had a very active social life and spent much time in the company of his young wife, members of his large family, and a wide circle of friends. As chronicled at the beginning of this chapter, he and his bride withdrew to Albury Lodge in Hertfordshire for the first fourteen months of their marriage, and both admired and emulated the intense piety of the Brograve household. Yet their time there was punctuated by numerous trips to London and various places in the country. Some of this was travel on business having to do with Anne’s inheritance, but it was rare for Simonds during these sojourns not to visit with Joachimi and/or his father and others in London, Sir Nathaniel Bernardiston in Kediton, Sir Martin Stuteville in Dalham, his “Aunt Lathum” in Essex, and his sisters and their husbands in Essex, Suffolk, and Surrey. For example, from January 27 until February 21, 1627, Simonds was in London dealing with the lawsuit initiated by Anne’s uncle Walter Clopton.169 On February 21, he rode to visit his “brother & sister Bowes” at Much Bromley Hall in Essex. From there he went “to visit my brother & sister Bokenham, and diuers other freinds” at Thornham Magna in Suffolk before returning to Albury on March 1. Back in London on legal business involving Anne’s estate on April 11, he had dinner with Joachimi and one of two “extraordinarie Embassadors” from the United Provinces on April 14. On April 17, he again dined with the Dutchmen and that afternoon took them for a tour of Cotton’s “rare & well furnisht librarie” that was led by Cotton himself.

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Fig. 3.2. The arms in stained glass of Simonds D’Ewes and Anne Clopton in Clopton Aisle at Holy Trinity Church, Long Melford, Suffolk. Photo by J. Sears McGee.

He returned to Albury Lodge on March 1 and spent the rest of the month “in discourses and visits with my dearest: in whose societie and conuerse . . . I passed ouer the remainder of the same moneth, or in discourses with her freinds ther, or in writing seuerall letters.” On June 1, Simonds and Anne traveled to London and visited his father and stepmother. They were joined by Simonds’s elder sister Jone Ellyott and her husband, Sir

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William, who were in town from Surrey, as well as other friends. They returned to Albury Lodge on June 14. Lady Brograve and Anne went to London from Albury “about some busines” on June 25 and came back on June 27. Simonds was back in Essex on the matter of Anne’s manor of Newenham Hall on July 9 and 10.170 Anne and Simonds had married in October 1626 in London, but as the summer approached in 1627 Anne had “not yet seen Stowhall, the sweete and goodlie seate” in Suffolk that, as Simonds put it, “God had blessed my father in possession, & my selfe in reuersion.” Paul’s invitation led to the newlyweds’ first visit in July. On July 17, Simonds rode from Albury Lodge to Stow Hall. On July 18, having borrowed his father’s coach, he went to the house of his wife’s uncle, Walter Clopton, at Fordham in Cambridgeshire. Anne and her grandmother Lady Barnardiston also arrived at Fordham that evening. After observing the baptism of Walter’s son the next day, Anne, her grandmother, and Simonds went to Stow in the coach. Paul D’Ewes “expressed much ioy & contentacion” at seeing Anne, eight months after the wedding, because she was “much growen in stature, and improued in handsomnes: her handes alsoe which nature had shaped long comelie & little, had attained to a full measure of delicacie & whitenes.” For the rest of July, they engaged in “discourses recreations and visits, my wife enioying the acquaintance & societie of most of the neighbour gentrie.”171 Dame Ann Barnardiston left on July 31 to visit her son Giles at Clare, but Simonds and Anne remained at Stow for most of August. They narrowly avoided a catastrophe when on August 1 they were boating on the moat that surrounded Stow Hall and fell into the water. Simonds struggled to the surface of the water and managed to pull Anne out. But “such abundance of water gott in at her mouth” that she was “terrified with feare & astonishment.” Afterward, no lasting harm done, “wee all acknowledged Gods mercifull prouidence” thankfully.172 It was during this visit to Stow, eight months after their wedding, that Simonds and Anne first had sexual intercourse: in August 1629 he mentioned that they had been “partakers of the nuptiall rites about two yeares.”173 The young couple went to Cambridge in Paul’s coach on August 27. Simonds gave Anne a tour of several colleges, and they climbed to the top of the chapel at King’s College. On the south side of the roof, Anne’s little “foote was sett” in the lead on the roof “and her armes exsculped within the compasse of the foote in a small escocheon.” On the following day they returned to Albury Lodge and a warm welcome from the Brograves.174 Simonds resumed his “vsvuall course of secret fasting,” which he had suspended during the sojourn in Suffolk. He also returned to his study of Britain’s history and other projects while making several short trips

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to London to see Joachimi, Cotton, and other friends. He was delighted when Ann, “vpon her owne earnest entreatie & desire, ioined with mee in fasting & humiliacion” on December 17. It would be the first of many occasions when “wee two alone ioined together” in this exercise, and he was pleased that Ann began “to draw most blessed & certaine signes of her owne future happines after death from seuerall graces” and thereby gain assurance of it.175 This was precisely when Simonds was completing the composition of his “Indications of certainty in the matter of salvation” and approaching the apogee of his fears about the survival, at least in the near term, of the “true religion” in the Low Countries, France, and the Holy Roman Empire as described earlier in this chapter. Simonds and Anne remained in Hertfordshire until early in February 1628. He looked back on the fourteen months when they had lived at Albury Lodge as a time that had engendered a “great encrease of pietie in vs both” because of the “exemplarie deuotion” of Dame Ann and her daughter Hanna. Simonds also noted that he had saved a considerable sum because he had not had to pay for lodging during that time. But his father and Lady Denton “were both desirous to enioy our societie,” and he wanted a more convenient base to pursue his researches in the Tower and elsewhere and also tend to his legal matters. He decided to move to London for about six months each year, spending the rest of the year at Stow Hall. He and Anne would lodge in his father’s suite in the Six Clerks’ Office in Chancery Lane, and he could use his chamber at the Middle Temple as his library and study. More frequent access to Cotton and Joachimi was another benefit, and the move was made on February 6.176 On March 10, they all headed for Stow Hall, breaking the journey with two days spent happily with the Bowes family in Essex. Anne became very sick on March 24 and smallpox was feared, but after three days she had recovered and the physician decided that “her disease had been but the measils at the most.”177 On June 11 she traveled to Albury Lodge for several weeks with her kin there, and Simonds applied himself to his studies in London while also keeping a close eye on the 1628 Parliament. His father and Lady Denton went to Albury Lodge on July 17 to pick up Anne, and Simonds met the three of them at Stow Hall. Although, as usual, at Stow Hall the summer “was spent in visits discourses and letter-writing and such like,” he nevertheless managed to spend “manye dayes & houres” at work on “Great Brittaines Strengh & Weakenes” and other projects described above.178 On October 4, 1628, Simonds and Paul returned to London via the Stuteville home at Dalham, where they spent two days. On November 19, the “newe brick house in the Strand” that Joachimi had rented from Edward Cecil, earl of Wimbledon, was destroyed by a fire that broke out

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in the middle of the night. The ambassador himself was away in Holland, but his wife and two of his daughters escaped in their nightgowns. Simonds arrived at 8 a.m. and went to visit them at a nearby house where they had taken refuge. He and Anne returned later that day to help and offer comfort and “found them somewhat recouered from their former fright & feare.” Sadly, Joachimi’s papers from four decades of diplomatic work were burned, along with “much rich householdstuffe.”179 Joachimi was unable to return to London until February 1629, and Simonds went to see him on the 23rd: “Our meeting together and sight each of other affoorded vs much comforte: hee was a true louer of Gods church, and . . . wee condoled the miseries of the publike together as wee vsed to do when we mett.”180 On February 25, “my Dearest and myself” and Paul left town for Bishop’s Stortford, where they spent the night before going on to the Stuteville’s at Dalham. On the 28th, Simonds rode to Bury St Edmunds and dined with the sheriff of Suffolk, Brampton Gurdon, before visiting Justice Hervey, a justice of the Court of Common Pleas. That evening he joined his wife, father, and stepmother, all of whom had just arrived from Dalham Hall, at Stow Hall.181 On April 9, Simonds and Paul met at Bury with Anne’s uncle Walter about the lawsuit concerning Anne’s estate, and an important agreement was reached. Walter would remain executor only until Anne “came of full age,” and Walter would thereby save additional legal costs “which would in time haue vtterlie ruined him.” Indeed, both parties were spared “much vnnecessarie expence” and “a great deale of freindshipp & correspondencie” ensued.182 Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston wrote to Simonds to express his joy at the “agreement wrou[gh]t betwene your vncle and you” and regretted that there were not many more people who compromised rather than persisting wilfully in lawsuits that produced “too much affliction & misery.”183 The D’Ewes clan returned to London on June 1, and on June 13, Simonds noted that, with his help, Anne “finished the markes of her euidence to a better life” that she had been writing during their times of fasting together.184 islington In August 1629, they traveled to Albury Lodge so that Anne could be at her Aunt Hanna’s side during the delivery of her daughter. Unfortunately, the child—Hanna’s first after six years of marriage—came earlier than expected, and they arrived two days after the birth. Hanna’s long barrenness had led her to fear that she would never conceive a child, and she had often told Anne of her hopes that Anne and Simonds would “haue many children.” By this time, Simonds wrote, “our owne feares . . . weere almost turned into despaires.” They had been making love for two years,

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“and yet had as little expectacion of issue as in the first eight months of our continencie, next after marriage.” As if this were not enough, Paul began to make trouble about this matter in August and, as Simonds put it, “occasioned mee another mischeife.” Having concluded that Anne was barren, Paul began to worry that she might outlive Simonds and “carrie away too great a part of his estate by her iointure.” He urged Simonds to persuade Anne to yield “a greate parte of it.” Much vexed, Simonds told his father what an “vniust and vnequall a demand it was.” He wrote to Paul from Hertfordshire asserting that such a thing “was against law equitie and conscience.” Although Paul then relented, “this & other following disgusts” following his last visit to Stow Hall led Simonds to decide that he and Anne should never have left Albury Lodge and that it was time to find a residence of their own. Because much of the benefit of Anne’s estate would not come to them for some time and because much of the Symonds estate at Coxden had been leased for three lives at low rents, he was in debt and poorly prepared to begin housekeeping.185 Nevertheless, on October 6 Simonds rented a house in Islington and made arrangements to have it remodeled for his purposes. On the 8th, he went to London and spent the morning adding to his notes on the Elizabethan parliamentary journals. His father arrived that afternoon with Lady Denton, and “our meeting was as serene as if ther had been noe disgusts.” Simonds returned to Albury Lodge on October 9 and continued his work on the same project. He reflected that, as had happened before, “the diuine prouidence did often send mee a crosse & a comforte together not onlie to teach mee fullie the vncertaintie of all sublunarie comforts, but to instruct mee to depend euerie day moore & moore vpon him.” Being forced to take a house at great expense “was a reall affliction to mee,” and so was the absence of children from his marriage. Simonds acknowledged that his “owne name and familie . . . was deare unto mee,” and its continuance depended upon him. He had “long laboured” to prove its origin in the nobility of Gelderland, and that effort would have been for naught without a male child. Only he, his father, and his brother Richard (who was yet a schoolboy) remained, and only he was in a position at this time to have an heir. Then, at last, came the comfort that overcame these concerns: “through Gods goodnes,” late in October he learned that Anne was four months pregnant “to both our great comfortes.” On December 22, they moved to a house in Islington that belonged to her kinsman John Bygrave. They remained there for a month while the work on the house was completed.186 This included the purchase of furnishings, and special attention was given to preparing the room that would serve as his study and library. On January 5 he and Anne dined with his father at the Six

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Clerks’ Office, and Paul “both saw & was enformed, to his great ioy & content that my wife was with childe.” On January 19 the young couple finally moved into the Islington house, which was situated, according to a letter Arthur Barnardiston addressed to Simonds, “at the further ende of Islington next to Highgate.”187 During February 1630, Simonds continued to work on the Elizabethan parliament project while also arranging his “bookes, Manuscripts autographs and papers” in his library. A lawsuit in the Court of Chancery between Anne and her late father’s second wife, Lady Tracy, took some of his “pretious time.” On February 12 he fasted by himself, and on Sunday, February 27, he spent much of the day “in a priuate religious fast & humiliacion with my whole companie, it being the first familie fast that euer I obserued my selfe.” Always cautious about staying within the confines of the law, he noted that he later repeated this practice “because it was neither repugnant to the Lawes of the Commonwealth nor of the Church.” On March 7 he received his first visitor to his new home in Islington, and appropriately it was his close friend Joachimi and his daughters. The ambassador, he recalled, “spent some time with mee in my librarie and much approued my severall collections.” With no little satisfaction, Simonds also mentioned that his father was showing signs of realizing his mistake in causing the removal from Stow Hall by demanding a “friuolous & vnreasonable . . . diminution” of Anne’s jointure. Paul also realized by this time the “new detts & exigents this course had put mee vpon” and thus tried to make amends, not only by expressing “moore affectionate respect then before” but also by providing assistance with the expenses of Anne’s lying-in and giving “three faire siluer gilt goblets” that had originally belonged to Simonds’s maternal great-grandfather. Obviously hoping to “testifie the abolition of all former disgusts which had happened between us,” on March 9, Paul and Lady Denton and several other members of his family arrived in Islington and spent the next five weeks with Simonds and Anne.188 Simonds concluded that “the pious duties I performed in my familie” and Paul’s “serious perusall of the sermons of that heauenly diuine, John Preston, . . . touching Gods Alsufficiencie” at Islington did serve his father well during the illness that took his life the following year. Especially, Preston’s “practicall diuinitie . . . fullie conuinced him, that . . . Gods children may . . . ordinarilie in this life attaine to the Assurance of ther own saluation.” On this key point of Puritan doctrine, it must be remembered, Paul had expressed doubts during the debate Simonds had with Edmund Cartwright at Stow Hall back in 1625.189 Finally, on April 30 at approximately 2 a.m., Anne gave birth to their first child. Between 3 and 4 in the morning, Simonds sent to Stuteville the wonderful news

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that Anne had birthed a “little fatt daughter” and added that “trulie shee is to mee better then tenn sonns.”190 The new parents were “soe ioyfull” that mother and child were “doing well, and in hope that wee might haue moore as well males as females, as I had not halfe soe many sadd apprehensions for the want of a sonne now as I had afterwardes.” The baptism followed at Islington on May 13, and she was christened Anne. Her godmothers were Hanna Brograve (standing in for Anne’s beloved grandmother) and Lady Denton.191 Paul left London for Stow Hall on June 29, 1630, having been preceded by his wife because of an outbreak of the plague. As the plague spread, taking seventy-seven lives in London in July, Simonds and Anne considered leaving as well, especially after “a house in Islington” quite near theirs “was infected.” In the end, they stayed and suffered no harm. Besides the continuation of his studies of the Fleta, the Elizabethan parliaments, and his wife’s genealogy, July was “deuoted to the visiting or entertaining of greate personages.” For example, Simonds and Anne dined with “her kinsman” Sir Julius Caesar and his wife on July 16 at Hackney, and this meeting probably emboldened Simonds to write the long letter filled with dark thoughts from prophecies and fears about religion to Caesar that was described earlier in this chapter. On July 21, the D’Eweses went to Joachimi’s new home at Chelsea for dinner, and “they all dined with vs at Islington” on July 29 except Joachimi’s wife, whose health was failing. She died a short time later.192 By this time, the terrible danger to the “true religion” that he and Joachimi had long “condoled” was giving way to better news thanks to the successes of Gustavus Adolphus. The mood at these dinner parties in July must have been lifted by the Swedish king’s successes. August proved to involve less visiting and more study for Simonds, although Anne suffered from a “verie sharpe and violent fitt” of an ague (malaria) on August 5. But she was sufficiently recovered to join her husband at a Sunday dinner a few days later with the Lord Keeper of England, Sir Thomas Coventry, and his lady, who also lived in Islington. On August 17, he reported to his father about the event. Lady Coventry had written an invitation to join them for “hott venison & to excuse the shortnes of ther warning” because “the buck came in but one halfe howre” before. After the meal began, Lord North and his lady arrived “vnexpected” and occupied “all the dinner time with the needles & vaine discourse of a dogg” of theirs that had died. Simonds strongly disapproved of such a discourse on the Sabbath and told his father that it showed that the Norths were “ill catechized in the principles of religion.”193 Simonds and Anne spent September 11 in “priuate humiliacion & fasting,” another month that Simonds managed to spend mainly in his

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study.194 October was similar except for a dinner with Joachimi at Chelsea and a sad trip to Albury Lodge for Anne during which Hanna Brograve gave birth to another daughter who soon died. During November, Simonds completed the third version of his will and also his work on the Fleta. On December 16, Paul and Lady Denton came to Islington to dine, and Simonds recalled that he had “familiar discourses” with his father during the afternoon. After a visit to the Ellyott household in Surrey, they traveled to Stow Hall. Since Paul’s final illness began in February 1631, this December visit proved his last to Islington. “The rest of December was passed ouer neither in dicing nor carding, but in varietie of studies, or in harmeles visits, & vseful discourses.”195 the death of paul d’ewes On February 9, 1631, Richard D’Ewes, then a schoolboy at Bury St Edmunds, wrote a letter in Latin to his father. Addressing Paul as “his most worthy father, and most excellent man,” Richard wished him “a thousand thousand greetings.” As Simonds had done before him, Richard flaunted his learning by praising his father for the way that he had conveyed “the eloquence of Plato, the ingenuity of Aristotle, and the wisdom of Cicero.” He thanked his father, writing that “there are as many twinkling stars in the enormous sky as all the daily kindnesses” he had received from his father. He closed, quite conventionally, by apologizing for “this untrained and unpolished letter.”196 At his Six Clerks’ Office on February 22, 1631, Paul “fell sick of a feauer ioined with a plurisie” and died three weeks later. Simonds had what he called “many sadd & heauie iournies to him” during these weeks, and he described his father’s ordeal with the same kind of detail that he had that of his mother in 1620. Two physicians, Doctors Giffard and Baskerville, came twice daily and each received ₤2 for his efforts. They let blood twice at the outset, but the pain on his left side and the pleurisy both increased. This caused them to “open a vaine againe” on February 26. This provided “some surcease,” but the pain returned “soe violentlie” that Paul was bled a fourth time on March 1. Simonds recorded that he “neuer saw worse nor moore infected blood come from anie man.” It was hoped that “the losse of soe much corrupted bloud” would be beneficial, but instead “his case grew moore desperate then before,” and the doctors decided that “hee had lost too much bloud alreadie for one of his age.” A “most sharpe & irkesome soarenes of his mouth” then ensued, “the fatall forerunner of death manie times.” Strangely, however, at times Paul was “soe eased & cheared” that fears of his death receded, and Simonds managed to find time to work on his Saxon dictionary and his journals of the Marian parliaments. Simonds was the more hopeful be-

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cause of Paul’s “temperate diet, & strong constitution” that had always caused him to think of his father as “a man of manie yeares.” When, one evening upon going to bed, Paul “tolde mee it was time for him now to die, hee had kept mee soe long from mine estate.” Simonds responded: “God forbid, Sir, . . . yow should soe thinke” because he was living “happilie & quietly for my studies.”197 As with his mother in her last days, Simonds was acutely attentive to Paul’s spiritual condition and believed that during his illness Paul sought “to search and trie his owne heart (which had alwaies before been too much sett vpon the businesses & profits of this present life) & to prepare his way to heauen by a liuelie faith and a true repentance.” Simonds wrote that he “neuer saw anie man expresse less feare of death,” Indeed, Paul was “most readie to heare of anie thing that tended to his soules good . . . yea, when hee seemed to slumber, hee would suddenlie breake out into serious & zealous praiers, of which I my selfe was an eare witness.” On Sunday, February 27, a minister came to provide them both with the sacrament of communion. Yet by March 12, in both his own opinion and that of others, Paul was “soe exceedinglie amended . . . that all danger was past.” Simonds was therefore amazed when one of Paul’s servants came to Islington on March 14 at about 11 a.m. to “bring mee worde that if euer I desired to see him alive, I must speedilie come away.” He left the familial fast they had begun three hours before without taking any food and hastened to Chancery Lane in the hope that he could still pray with his father. But it was too late. Paul still lived, but “his quick & bright blacke ey was setled in his head & all sense and understanding past & gone.” In the few remaining hours, “his long struglings betweene life and death weere violent & terrible. I beleue hee fetched aboue fiftie deep-diuing great groanes after I came, which would haue mooued the heart of a Turke or Sarazen to pitie had hee heard them: they often droue mee to zealous secret praier for him, which I ioined with my fasting.” After all this the struggle subsided, and Paul lay in his bed “with soe little noise and stirre” that it took a mirror held near his nose and mouth to determine that he had died. This was soon after 5 p.m. He had earlier given his will to his wife, and it included “manie religious & pious instructions” for Simonds and his youngest sister Elizabeth, then aged twelve.198 Paul D’Ewes had undergone a fierce and painful struggle while he was dying, but he would have been utterly astonished had he known what a battle Simonds would face to get his body buried. Paul’s will stipulated that his funeral sermon be preached in St. George Stowlangtoft by Richard Chamberlain of nearby Hunston, the same godly minister who had preached his first wife’s funeral sermon. But the rector of St. George, Rich-

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ard Damport, formerly a fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, flatly refused Chamberlain permission to do that service. Damport had been the successor to Simonds’s Cambridge friend, Edward Tilman. Tilman had lasted only a year at Stowlangtoft before moving elsewhere. Simonds said only that Tilman resigned after “some vnexpected disgusts giuen him,” and the most likely source of those “disgusts” had been the often grasping Paul D’Ewes. Owners of advowsons not infrequently made nominations on conditions that required the nominee to pay them in one way or another. In other words, they demanded kickbacks. This practice was part of the long history of simony (the sale of positions in the church, often to the advantage of powerful laymen) that went back at the least to the eleventh century and probably before. With Tilman’s departure, the serpent enters the story. Simonds seems not to have been consulted about Tilman’s replacement. He characterized the two men as polar opposites: Tilman was “not onlie a learned & able diuine but a religious and humble man,” but Damport “was of a haughtie & proud spirit & vtterlie disused to preaching & vnfurnished for it.” Paul nevertheless ignored the advice he received from “many learned & godlie freinds” and, inveigled by the cleric’s “cunning practices & agents,” he gave in to Damport even though he hardly knew the man. According to Simonds, Damport’s “carriage before hee obteined it, was with such feigned submissines below humilitie it selfe” and his promise to preach frequently, won him the post. Sidney Sussex was thought of as a “puritan” college, and this may have misled Paul about the man’s views. Or perhaps his theological roots were sufficiently shallow to enable him to present himself as what he thought his potential patron sought. As we shall see below, he would board Bishop Matthew Wren’s Arminian bandwagon when he entered the diocese in 1636. Simonds hinted too that the “carnall perswasions” of Lady Denton’s relatives had a strong influence. Paul later opined that Damport became “the greatest crosse or affliction hee had in the worlde, & that hee had giuen his parsonage of Stowlangtoft to an olde Dunce & an ungratefull man.”199 Damport had matriculated at Sidney Sussex in 1604 and proceeded BA (1606–7), MA (1610), and BD (1617).200 D’Ewes’s first encounter with him occurred on Sunday, July 10, 1625, during a brief visit to Stowlangtoft made while most of his time was still devoted to legal studies in London. When in the metropolis, his habit was to hear three sermons every Sunday. But on that Sunday in Suffolk, he recounted that Damport had preached “an easie & shorte sermon in the forenoon, [but] in the afternoone hee neither preached nor catechized; and I thinke it was the first time that either my father or my selfe had been at diuine service in that

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church on the Lordes day without being partakers of two sermons.”201 In September 1625, when his sister Grace had married Wiseman Bokenham at Stowlangtoft, he recognized that Damport was capable of performing well in the pulpit if he put his mind to it. He wrote that at the marriage Damport “made one of the neatest and well-penned sermons that I euer heard preached, which I conceiue cost him not onlie some weekes but some monthes time.”202 For a long time after that, however, things went downhill. Yet in the months before Paul’s death, Simonds’s recollection was that his father and Damport had “in shew at least been reconciled fullie” and that the rector had often dined at Paul’s table at Stow Hall. His refusal to permit Chamberlain to preach the funeral sermon was therefore seen by “all men that heard of it” as an act “of extreame ingratitude & inhumanitie.”203 Simonds told Stuteville that he might decide to have his father buried at Lavenham (where he succeeded his father as lord of the manor). There “I could command all things & have contemned Danfords mallice” and later have his father’s body moved to Stowlangtoft after Damport’s death or departure.204 At about the same time that the argument over the funeral sermon went on, Simonds wrote to inform Stuteville that he had heard that Damport was putting it about in Bury St Edmunds and elsewhere that he was on the verge of marrying Stuteville’s daughter. D’Ewes said that “as your euer faithfull freind I thinke it fitting to give yow notice, . . . [that] his ambition may happilie dreame of a Bishoppwricke, [but] yow know his bold parts too well; & his last hath a moore vglie aspect then all the rest.”205 Simonds attributed Damport’s behavior to his “excessiue pride,” and he was incensed that the clergyman had denied his late benefactor “soe poore a curtesie” and not allowed “his deceased corps to bee brought to the graue in quiet.” When Simonds complained of Damport’s behavior to Francis White, the bishop of Norwich, the prelate said that “hee much wondred at it, for hee neuer knew anie minister denie that curtesie to meere strangers.”206 Simonds then arranged for Dr. Ambrose Copinger, the rector at Lavenham, to come to Stowlangtoft to preach the funeral sermon, all the while fearing that “Mr Danfordes pride and peruersenes” would disrupt the burial service. Fortunately, as he put it, “in the issue to my great comforte all was passed ouer orderlie & fairelie.” On April 25, 1631, his father’s body was brought in its coffin from Stow Hall to the church. It reached its final resting place near that of his mother “at the vpper end of the quire . . . neare the south window next the east” of the chancel. All of Paul’s and Sissillia’s children (except the eldest daughter, Jone) were present, “and ther bestowed with mee manye teares vpon his funerall sermon.”207

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Much to Simonds’s chagrin and surprise, one more ugly battle lay ahead as a consequence of his father’s demise. About an hour after Paul breathed his last on March 14, Lady Denton performed a task he had given her by delivering to Simonds a box containing her late husband’s will. In the room with them were Simonds’s wife, his youngest sister, Elizabeth, and the Ellyotts. “Vpon my opening the box,” Simonds wrote, “many euills, as out of that which as the poets faigne Pandora brought to Prometheus, ensued.” Sir William asked to read the will, and Simonds gave it to him before he read it himself. It must be remembered that Simonds had helped Sir William over various “rubbs” on the way to his marriage with Jone that Paul had placed in their way and that both Simonds and Paul had made many happy visits to the Ellyott home at Busbridge over the years. But Ellyott, driven by his “idle & distempered choler,” immediately expressed disappointment that Paul had left nothing to his wife or himself and “little to his children.” “His owne imaginarie expectacion” unfulfilled, he was, as Simonds saw it, “not able to temper his minde” and began to make complaints. At the same moment, upon reading the will, Simonds had to try to contain his own disappointment. His father had left the use of much of Stow Hall to Lady Denton “during her life, soe as I was likelie for manye yeares to be debarred from liuing ther with peace or freedome.” In the event, he soon bought it from her, thereby avoiding “many unkindnesses & differences, betweene vs.” Another problem arose from the fact that Paul had made his son Richard (aged fifteen at this point) his “sole executor” and Simonds merely the “administrator” until Richard turned eighteen in October 1633. Anything Simonds did in the process of settling the estate was therefore open to second guessing from various quarters and might be reopened when Richard took over. Worst of all, Paul had committed a portion of ₤3,000 to young Elizabeth, a larger dowry than that of any of the three daughters who were already married. “Netled” by this, Ellyott in a matter of days persuaded the Prerogative Court of Canterbury to authorize him to commission an inventory at the expense of the estate. According to Simonds, his brother-in-law’s haste led to a faulty inventory that omitted ₤500 of “readie monie,” a sum that he could have kept silent about to his own gain. Instead, he corrected the error. Ellyott also filed suit against Simonds’s administratorship, costing the estate ₤400. Ellyott’s “ill example” led the other two husbands, Sir Thomas Bowes and Wiseman Bokenham, “to sue at common law for increase alsoe of ther wiues porcions,” suits that cost Richard’s estate ₤1,350 (not counting the legal costs). Not to be left out of the feeding frenzy, “the other fiue of the Six Clerkes who suruiued my Father, by the vnconscionable & cunning incitements of one Eueling the cheife amongst them,”

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extracted yet another ₤336 6s 6d at Richard’s expense. “God hath since iustly punished” these men, Simonds exulted, “by ther seuerall losses & paiments.” Simonds concluded his account of these “needles brabbles” by asserting that the one person “who had most cause of suite against my deare brother” was himself, and not only did not sue but also took good care of Richard’s estate and education until he reached his majority.208 In the same letter to Stuteville in which he warned his friend about Damport’s designs on his daughter, Simonds also wrote frankly of his anger toward Sir William Ellyott. He opined that “my brother Eliots passion & pride” had led him into “the weakest act I think hee ever plaied since he was of full age.” Paul’s requirement that he administer the will until his brother could take it over meant that, in addition to the costs associated with Ellyott’s moves, Simonds had to put up “principall bonds & counterbonds” totaling some ₤60,000. Stuteville, who along with Wiseman Bokenham and his father had to approve these arrangements, did so while also stating that “I esteeme Sr Simonds D’ewes to be soe honeest and soe truly religious that I make noe doubt but he would carefully performe this trust though he weare not tyed by any security.”209 Presumably, Simonds felt that if arguments over the size of portions or other inequities or flaws in his father’s will existed they would have been better pursued by negotiation within the family rather than hasty and expensive resort to lawsuits. He showed himself ready to achieve what he called a “composition” with Lady Denton regarding the value of her claim to the use of part of Stow Hall, and there is no reason to think he would not—given the opportunity—have reached agreements on other points of dispute. Despite the fact that he looked forward to enjoying living at Stow Hall with his family, he was genuinely concerned about his stepmother, now widowed a second time. “If your owne conscience concurre with my iudgment,” he asked Stuteville at the end of March to use his influence to encourage her to remain at Stow at least until the autumn before following through on her intention to find a house of her own. He related that he and Lady Denton had agreed on which rooms at Stow would be hers until she decided to move away. Simonds thought this best for her because “the wound is raw & the greife should be greene.” The best treatment for her “melancollie” would be living with Simonds and Anne. This was because their companionship “& tenn thousand advises walks and discourses each with other” would provide a better defense against her sadness than “a solitarie housekeeping.”210 Significantly, when Richard came of age and later went on to pursue his own career in the king’s army beginning in the late 1630s, there were only a few moments of friction between the brothers. As we shall see,

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their correspondence during Richard’s travels through the Low Countries, France, and Italy after he left Cambridge was lively and affectionate. Even after they chose opposite sides in the Civil War that began in 1642, they remained devoted to each other. Simonds expressed deep resentment of “the false & virulent toungs of malitious backbiters; but neuer moore uniustlie then by ther misreporting of my sinceere & religious care of the weldoing of my fathers soule during his sicknes.” This suggests that rumors had circulated to the effect that he had tried to influence his dying father to enhance his inheritance by bringing in a minister to provide “a priuate conference” and the sacrament. Simonds’s tiny daughter “did much resemble” her grandfather, and he could easily have “brought her often” to visit the sick man. Simonds insisted he did nothing of the sort precisely because he wanted to avoid giving excuses “to malignant toungs to report my aime was to gett from him: and therbie to procure a parte of a porcion for my childe.” He had invited the divine to visit because “my cheife care was for his future happines.” Since considerable sums were dispensed to the physicians to care for the sick man’s body, Simonds thought it perfectly logical that “some regard should alsoe bee had to the soule.”211 He did not attach names to such “backbiters,” so we cannot be certain whether he suspected Sir William Ellyott or other members of the family of traducing his motives or behavior. Yet the dust seems to have settled quickly. In a letter dated March 28, 1631, Simonds wrote to Stuteville about the matter. Lady Denton was visiting at the Stutevilles, and Simonds mentioned “to how little purpose my brother Elliott hath puddered [muddled] himselfe & vexed mee my Ladie cann at large relate.”212 In an undated letter to his wife (but very likely written in late April or May of 1631), Simonds said that “my brother Elliott hath verie lovinglie discovered a kind of repentance of his own actt.”213 It is notable that once some time had passed, the correspondence and visiting that had long characterized his relations with his sisters and their husbands resumed its normal course. There is ample evidence that the “brabbles” were forgotten, and in the margin of the manuscript of his autobiography he added a comment connected by an asterisk to a sentence that criticized Sir William’s behavior: “But this and all other vnkindnesses being whollie ouerpassed by mee, wee at last enioyed againe a most firme and endeared freindshipp.”214 It is clear from letters that Sir William wrote during the ensuing years that he delighted in that friendship and was grateful for Simonds’s counsel, help, and advice. The same is true for his connections with Wiseman Bokenham and Sir William Poley.

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4

Simonds D’Ewes must have looked forward to the time when he and Anne would not only live in but also preside over Stow Hall in Suffolk. Among his fond descriptions are these: “commodious & pleasant,” “sweete and goodlie,” “sweete & convenient,” and “sweete & faire seate.”1 Because he was wealthy, he could afford to maintain and enhance it from time to time. Most of his income came from rents from his properties in Suffolk, Dorset, and Essex, and his accounts for 1635 show that they added up to more than £1,500 a year.2 When 1631 began, he could have had no way of knowing that his vigorous, quirky, and often difficult father would fall ill in late February and die just a few weeks later. He could not have foreseen the fraught circumstances that ensued with respect to his father’s burial and the administration of his will. Ever the dutiful son, he faced these problems and solved them. He would quite reasonably have assumed that the pleasurable occupation of Stow Hall was on the page that he and Anne were turning to in the spring of 1631. King Charles I, just two years older than Simonds, had in 1629 made a decision that he thought would improve his prospects when he commenced his “personal rule,” a period that proved to last eleven years during which no parliaments would be summoned. In fact, however, both of these uxorious young men were to be bitterly disappointed. Simonds’s “personal rule” at Stow Hall would be repeatedly darkened by the deaths of beloved children and interrupted by conflicts with Richard Damport, Stowlangtoft’s rector. A rebellion in Scotland would eventually force King Charles to call not one but two fractious parliaments in 1640. The reaction against Charles I’s regime and the civil wars that ensued would transform the life of D’Ewes and end that of the king. This chapter will describe the private and domestic side of Simonds’s life and the next will turn to his outlook on public events in this period.

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The Search for a Home Soon after his father’s death on March 14, 1631, Simonds was in London grappling with the administration of his father’s will. He began a letter to his wife as follows: “My dearest dearest, Thy sweete lines though few did much reuiue my dull & sadd spirits being iustlie wearied out with a multitude of busines heere.” As if his troubles in London were not enough, he reported that he had received a letter from Lady Denton that showed that “my plaug [plague] by that notorious wretched dissembler [Damport] is like to receave no end as long as himselfe cann subsist.” They decided to relocate to a place where they could hear more and better sermons and avoid any unnecessary strain as Anne’s second pregnancy proceeded. They must, he believed, find a means of escaping “as much as possiblie wee may from his proud lookes.” His first choice of a refuge was a house belonging to a “Mr Bright” in Bury St. Edmunds, and he told Anne that he had instructed his servant John Pinchbeck to use “all speedie paines” to rent either that house “or some other, where wee may retire euerie Saturday night” in order to avoid the odious Damport in Stowlangtoft on Sundays. Simonds then continued: “instead of kissing the precious hand that wrote, I haue often kissed the paper on which it wrote. And if it may but please God yow may lay downe your great & hopefull burthen in anie other place then under his proud insolencie I shall account it a speciall mercie.” He apologized that he could not say when he would be able to rejoin her, because “my busineses for my brother Richard grow soe intricate,” but if Pinchbeck found a suitable house he would “come home with the greater comforte: though my greatest worldlie happines bee in your selfe.”3 The negotiation for a place in Bury came to naught and with it the notion that they could live at Stow Hall on weekdays and the weekends in Bury. Simonds had been in Lavenham on Tuesday, April 26, and he had heard “a good sermon” that day because there was “a constant lecture of neighbouring ministers vpon each market day weekelie” except during the harvest season. He described Lavenham as “a faire market towne,” whereas Stowlangtoft was a village.4 He was, in succession to his father, also the lord of the manor of Lavenham where he owned a house and the church living was in his gift. He thus decided to move his family to Lavenham, which is twelve miles south and slightly west of Stowlangtoft. Moreover, the rector of the magnificent church of St. Peter and Saint Paul at Lavenham was the godly Ambrose Copinger, who had saved the day by preaching Paul D’Ewes’s funeral sermon on April 25. On May 25, Simonds wrote to Anne to tell her of his decision about the move, saying

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that he intended to go from London to Albury Lodge the following Saturday in order “to spend the Lordes day, & to comfort my wearied spirits by partaking the Lordes supper ther.” Thus he could avoid “our iollie preist at Stow” and “his impious custome” of treating us as “strangers as long as wee are in the cuntrie.” He regretted the need “to defile my paper or make sadd thie dearest soule with the remembrance of his peruerse vanitie . . . which yow weeklie see.” He instructed Anne to have their servant George arrange for a carpenter and a tiler to make some improvements in the Lavenham house before their arrival. He begged her not to be saddened because he was confident that when he could tell her all of his reasons for it he was sure both she and Lady Denton would “highlie approue it.” He sweetened the pot by reporting that her beloved aunt, Hanna Brograve, would accompany him and stay with them for a time there.5 He moved there from Islington on May 31 and brought Anne there on the next day. The house was soon “almost fullie furnisht,” and Anne and Hanna “took good satisfaction,” not least because they heard “two good sermons each sunday, & an excellent one each” Tuesday morning. Simonds also enjoyed getting back to his studies, although legal matters pulled him away from them frequently.6 deaths and dangers On June 23, their first child, Anne, became ill, “soe dangerouslie as shee twice sounded [swooned or fainted] away; & much adoe ther was to fetch life of her againe.” Fortunately, the little girl survived that crisis and was therefore in the house when her brother Clopton was born soon after four the next morning.7 Understandably, the initial emotion was joy, and Simonds dashed off a brief celebratory Latin letter to Joachimi: “God, the Best and Greatest, made us happy with a son born in the early morning” on June 24. He explained that the lad would be baptized “Clopton” in honor of “his mother, the heir of a very ancient family” in Suffolk.”8 The baptism duly occurred on July 5 in Lavenham with Ambrose Copinger presiding, and Simonds arranged that all three of the witnesses shared the Clopton surname, led by Anne’s uncle Walter. Sadly, Simonds recalled, “wee had too much reioicing both at the birth and christening” and thereby learned “moore moderacion for the time to come.” Two days later, “our sweete infant was a little ill,” and then on July 9 he was “surprized with a violent & little intermitting laske or scouring” [diarrhea]. He seemed to recover somewhat that afternoon, but by around six in the evening he “lay quietlie breathing out his last & innocent breath.” Simonds wrote that he had “attended him,” while fasting most of the day. Then when the infant gave “vpp the ghost, my Dearest and my selfe could not

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refraine from many teares sighs & mournings.”9 The tiny corpse was buried in the chancel of the church, and Simonds later provided a brass plate with a Latin inscription for it. To this day, it is known to parishioners as “the baby brass,” and it contains not only Clopton’s body but also those of his twin brothers born in March 1633 whose lives were even shorter than his. For the first but by no means the last time, Simonds and Anne struggled to understand why their baby died. “Wee feared it perished,” he wrote, “by the cursed ignorance or neglect” of the attendants who had been engaged for Anne’s lying in. She desired to nurse her “goodlie sweete child,” but she was “fatallie aduised by such as weere about her, that the childe should not sucke of anie other till her breasts were fullie drawen & made fitt for it, during which time it was soe weakened, as it afterwardes prooued the cause of his ruine.”10 This experience would shape their approach to her subsequent pregnancies, and each time, the circumstances always varying, so did the analyses of the reasons for each new catastrophe. As we shall see, he would write to his sisters to seek their counsel from their own experience of the illnesses of infants in a desperate struggle to defend the fragile health of the infants that Anne birthed. It was a never-ending effort, and Simonds also introduced into it his persistent questions about his own worthiness for God’s assistance. Not a word or a sentence in anything he wrote placed any blame on Anne. In this instance, he worried that God was humbling him because he believed himself to be “by nature marvailous prone” to the sin of pride, the very sin that “God moore seueerelie chasticeth in his children.” Moreover, he used “sharper remedies for purging it out of them.”11 In the Latin autobiographical sketch that he wrote for Joachimi in 1638, he said that in Clopton’s death, “the order of nature” was “disturbed.”12 The deaths of his father and infant son were not the only heavy blows Simonds suffered in 1631. His “louing & faithfull freind” Sir Martin Stuteville, whose health had been failing for some time, died of “an Apoplexie” on June 13 at Bury St. Edmunds.13 Stuteville had written on August 14, 1630, that his eyes were failing so badly and his hand become so unsteady “that I can not endure to write much at one tyme.”14 A different kind of trouble arrived for Simonds in July. Late in May, Sir Nicholas Hyde, the chief justice of the Court of King’s Bench, had appointed him to the Suffolk grand jury, and he had failed to appear on July 13 because of the recent loss of Clopton and urgent legal business in London. In addition, Simonds had reprooved Hyde’s bailiff for delivering the summons on a Sunday morning. Hyde, “like a true malicious Atheist fined mee £20 in the face of the whole Countie almost.” Despite being informed of Simonds’s

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afflictions, the judge’s “barbarous and malitious heart” was not changed, and he refused to waive the fine. The fact that the fine was itself unjust was compounded by Hyde’s dispatch of the bailiff to perform his task “on that day which Christians sanctifie & hallow weekely for the Lordes day.” Simonds later discussed the matter with Sir George Crooke, another justice of the King’s Bench who was “a religious Judge & verie learned in the Lawes of the Realme.” Crooke said that the “fine was most vndeseruedlie & vniustlie sett” and that he would imprison a bailiff who “warned any man vpon the Sunday.” Simonds recalled that Hyde had hated his father, Paul. This animus stemmed from a lighthearted joke Paul had made at the time that Hyde had been made a bencher of the Middle Temple. The judge’s elder brother, Sir Laurence, was already a bencher. Paul had jested that this meant that the Middle Temple was “Hide-bound,” and the witticism later reached Nicholas’s ears. He was known to have owed his chief justiceship to the duke of Buckingham in 1626, and Simonds derided his qualifications for it by quoting the remark of another judge on the same court: “it was strange to see a man come & sitt amongst them as cheife on the Bench, whose face they had scarce euer seen at ther barre.” On the judge’s way home at the end of that summer circuit in 1631, Simonds acidly alleged that Hyde’s tightfistedness caused his death because to avoid the expense of lodging he rode fifty miles on “an extreame hott day . . . & therbie soe inflamed his bloud” as to cause “a burning fever” that took his life. Simonds described Hyde as a man “whose pouertie made him very worldlie minded & griping” and was in addition “of a yellowish complexion like tallow, & of a meane aspect, altogether vnbeseeming a place of that eminencie.” Concluding the account of Hyde, Simonds wrote that “I could say moore of him, but I leaue him to his graue, & to the doome of that iust Judge that cannot bee bribed.”15 His anger still simmering months later, he bitterly remarked to Joachimi in mid-September that “God has also compensated me in some way for the death of my son . . . for he took Nicholas Hyde from this life.”16 Friday, July 29, 1631, was spent in a private fast with Anne and other members of the household. Then, on August 9, the D’Ewes family left Lavenham for Stow Hall, where they found that “our sweete and pleasant seate gaue us the greater content because wee had been soe long from it.” Simonds settled into his varied research projects there, but he grumbled about the time given to “discourses visits & . . . other particulars touching my estate.” Anxious to again “bee neare the Recordes, & redeeme some parte of those innumerable pretious howres” he was losing, he decided that it was time to go back to Islington. On October 5, Anne went to the Barnardiston seat at Kedington, and Simonds joined her there the next

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morning. Together they went to Albury Lodge on October 6 and then on to Islington the next day. By the twelfth, he was again at work in the Tally Office of the Exchequer on “that august & rare Recorde called DOMESDEI.” Since he had leased Stow Hall to Lady Denton for two years that began at Michaelmas (September 29), it is clear that he envisioned a lengthy period during which there would indeed be visits to Stow Hall but that Islington would be home to himself, Anne, and their young daughter and servants.17 He was also considering an increase in the household’s staff because he had on September 19 asked Joachimi’s help in finding two more servants to whom he would pay £6 per annum “or more, as their merits and the judgement of your Honour directs.” Simonds considered himself and Anne “moderately skilled” in French but wished to improve that skill so they could converse in French with each other. One of the servants would be a pious woman “originating from honest Gallic or Belgian [Netherlandish] parents” who would attend to Anne and daily converse with her in French. The other would be a man also fluent in French, and he would perform a similar service for Simonds. There was one more requirement: the man had to be “an enemy to sloth and lazinesse,” for as Origen had written, “there is no lazy person in the house of the wise.” 18 It is not clear whether Joachimi found what Simonds was looking for, but the code word “honest” meant that he had in mind theological soundness. Since both he and Joachimi were thoroughgoing Calvinists, he expected that his friend’s inquiries would produce two Huguenots in need of places. These may have become the tutors Simonds was seeking. On Christmas Eve, Joachimi wrote Simonds a brief letter stating that “the bearer of this is a certain son of the outstanding man Casaubon” who was recommended by Joachimi’s son-in-law, the distinguished physician Sir Theodore Mayerne, as “the son of a good man.” The eminent Huguenot scholar Isaac Casaubon had lived in England from 1610 until his death in 1614.19 Casaubon’s son may have become one of several clerks that Simonds employed during the early 1630s. On August 4, 1632, a terrifying threat to Simonds’s and Anne’s twoyear-old daughter, Anne, was averted when the child “escaped a maruailous great danger.” A “yong wench” who was carrying little Anne was attacked by a mastiff that “leaped furiouslie twice on the wench, rent her clothes & peirced her skinn slightly, & verie narrowlie missed the childe.” On August 6, Anne and Simonds traveled to Surrey to visit the Ellyotts for ten days, proof that the ugly quarrel that had occurred about Paul D’Ewes’s will was over.20 Further confirmation of this came in a letter that Richard D’Ewes wrote to his brother from Cambridge on September 4. He was “exceedinge glad to heare, that there is a new reconsiliation of love,

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and affection betweene yow and my brother Eliot, with his wife: and I wish that it may longe continew.” For his part, he assured Simonds that his own “malice” toward Sir William was “revoked, annulled, and obliterated.”21 The normal pattern of life in Islington and later back at Stow Hall or Lavenham was one of study, church attendance, regular fasting, and correspondence about public and family matters. Simonds also had to see to the management of the manors that he and Anne owned. For example, he received reports from and sent instructions to Robert Cogan, his steward at his grandparents’ estate at Coxden in Dorset. Anne’s manor of Newenham in Essex also required attention, as a November 26, 1631, letter from John Humphrie, the steward there, shows. Humphrie apologized that due to serious illness, he had been unable to collect the rents in his usual manner. He had obtained some, but “the parson of Bartlow . . . will continue his wrongs still and hath fenced in ground which doth belong vnto your sheep walke.” In addition, this parson claimed a “carte waye” through one of D’Ewes’s fields even though “as farre as I can larne it hath not bene this 40 yeares any carteway knowne there.”22 bringing up richard Simonds’s brother Richard was fifteen when their father died, and since 1628 he had been at school in Bury St. Edmunds with the same admirable master under whom Simonds had studied, John Dickenson. The time had come for him to go to Cambridge, and Simonds engaged for him John Knowles, “a uerie religious Tutor” at St. Catharine’s Hall. Early in April 1632, he went to Suffolk in his coach and picked up Richard. Together they went to Cambridge on April 7, where Richard was admitted. On April 19 they were at the Middle Temple in London for Richard’s admission to that august institution, although he would not study there until after he left Cambridge. Richard then returned to Cambridge in Simonds’s coach, and Simonds stayed in London to continue his reading in the Domesday Book in the mornings and his lawsuits and meetings with friends in the afternoons. At this point, Simonds was planning the same kind of education for Richard that he and their father had obtained, ending in their grandfather Richard Symonds’s chamber in the Middle Temple. Simonds opined that it was his “cheife care to haue him religiously and vertuouslie educated, & therfore, before his departure to Cambridge I gaue him especiall cautions & instructions to beware of euill companie, the verie pests & poisoners of the yonger sort that are sent thither.”23 By October, Simonds had changed his mind and decided to remove Richard from Cambridge and settle him at the Middle Temple. In his autobiography, he stated simply that he was afraid that Richard’s “yong yeares &

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good disposicion, might in continuance of time be too much irretiated [ensnared] ther by euill companie.”24 These are his only remarks about his brother’s education in the autobiography. If it were our sole source, we might wonder whether young Richard had blotted his copybook in some way that had reached his brother’s ears. Had he taken to drinking or wenching or both? Or was the “evil company” more a soteriological than a moral threat? Was it instead a consequence of Simonds’s growing discomfiture at the advance of Arminian divinity at his alma mater (to be discussed below)? Was he concerned that his brother might be drawn to their siren song of free will? Fortunately, their correspondence enlightens us about Simonds’s abrupt change of mind. Richard’s first letter to his brother from Cambridge was dated May 15, and it began with the kind of references to the classics that Simonds had used in his own correspondence as an undergraduate. Displaying his learning with a flourish, Richard began by mentioning two of the greatest artists of antiquity, Zeuxis and Apelles. The former’s portrait of Venus “was helde of all men in admiration.” And Apelles “did so cuninglie portraie” grapes in a painting “that the very burdes ware deceiuede with there likenes.” Richard then said that if he were as skilled at writing as these men at painting, he would be able to pen a suitable letter to his “most worthie, and right noble Broother.” Instead, he begged “yow to take this will, for the deede, and this my insufficiencie, for an exacte performance. . . . thinke not, that anie confused chaos of terestiall cogitations shall euer transplante my minde, and hart from doeing yow service.” A little over half the letter having been devoted to this introduction, he finally got to his reason for setting quill to paper. The gown that they had ordered from the tailor had been delivered, and it was “too shorte for me.” In addition the sleeves were neither long enough nor in the correct fashion. What, he asked Simonds, should he do?25 Simonds’s response is undated but must have been written soon after he received Richard’s because the latter’s response to it is dated May 29. Simonds said nothing about the faulty gown (unless a comment appeared in the line or two of the letter that is invisible because of the way that it is bound into the volume). Instead, he sent a long and elaborate admonition, albeit one softened by repeated assurances of his continued love. He reminded Richard “how often my tender regard of your welfare hath notionally inculcated the theorie of caution into yow, your selfe cann best witnes,” but he sought in this letter “to leaue a deep impression” upon his brother. The next sentence explains the missive’s timing: his coachman had confessed “that those bestialized scholfellowes” who planned to get Richard drunk were his “former school fellowes at Burie” whose

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“divelish search & plott” aimed at inveigling him into their immoral way of living. Although the plot failed because of Richard’s “blessed absence” at that moment, Simonds feared that his brother might be seeing the same miscreants in Cambridge and be drawn into their circle. They were, he insisted, “pitchie companions, whose societie yow cannot touch vpon, but yow must be defiled with it.” It was vital that Richard understand that “grace cannot grow in anie heart wheere God sowes it not.” Nothing good could come from keeping company with “such idle buffones”; it would instead cause him to “reape loss of time, losse of good beginnings & losse of good name.” Many had gone down to destruction because they thought that they could “make noe conscience of little sinns, when yet a little leake sinkes a large shipp & a little breach looseth a strong fort. Your strenth will neuer serue to conflict with sinne being growen to the height if it cannot nipp it in the budd, strangle it in the cradle, & crush it in the shell.” It were much better that some “should account yow proud precise, or whatsoever else ther belching stomacke cann disgorge, then they trample vpon the innocencie of your youth.” He cited an acquaintance’s remark that “the onlie cause” he had gone astray “was to auoid the foulest appellation of Puritan.” Recalling his time at St. John’s, he wrote that “deare experience” had shown him that “by conversing with boies & rawheads yow shall learne nothing but emptines & vanitie.” Rather, Polonius like, he called upon Richard to associate “with men & prime schollers” for that was the way to “gaine wisedome & good example.” Simonds urged his brother to spend his time “with the best of your ranke” and avoid “pensioners & subsizers” from other colleges. And at St. Catharine’s, he ought to “be familiar with two or three at the moste” preferably his “own fellow pupills & chamberfellowes,” especially those of whose “‘ciuilitie & honest disposition yow are assured.”26 Richard, who received his brother’s letter on May 26, quickly responded, saying that he found in it “so much cownsell, coming from so intimate, & intier a Freinde” that he intended to follow it carefully. “It shall be therfore with mee; as it was with the Gretians” during the Trojan War, “to doe nothing but what thay had from the Oracul at Delphos.” However, that said, he next sought to set the record straight as to what had in fact happened during the journey back to Cambridge in Simonds’s coach. He began by asserting that so far as he could learn, the “Coachmans excessiue drunkennes” on that day in Cambridge was not the fault of Richard’s schoolmates because they did not arrive at the Rose in Cambridge until later in the day. By that time, the coachman may already have been intoxicated. Perhaps the liberation from Simonds’s direct observation created an opportunity he failed to resist. Indeed, that morning, ac-

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cording to Richard, “the Osteler of the Rose” had shown the coachman “a prittie Wench, and there he said, was the strongest liquor that ever he drunke of.” Of Simonds’s argument that he should not “bee ofended at the name of Puritan,” Richard acknowledged that he had indeed been so described. Yet he insisted that he was not troubled by it; rather he thought it “a glorie to suffer shame, or disgrace for Gods cause.”27 There the matter appears to have ended, as neither brother mentioned it in subsequent correspondence. It is nevertheless plausible that Simonds remained concerned about Richard’s vulnerability either to evil companions or to the new breed of evil theologians at Cambridge or both and that his decision to bring Richard to the Middle Temple that autumn was the result. On September 4, Richard wrote to his brother in Islington to thank him for his “infinite favores . . ., and love ouer me.” He spoke of “that naturall amitie, and affinitie betweene vs. Which for my parte, I doe professe seriouslie, is immoueable, thowgh yow neuer as yet haue made triall of mee.” He reported that he had enjoyed good health in Cambridge except for “a few cowldes, the ayre being verie sharpe.”28 The record is then silent about Richard until October 14, 1633, when he came of age at eighteen and could take over his own affairs. Simonds’s administration of their father’s will ended, and he had to hand over the funds still in his hands that were owing to his brother. Then living at Stow Hall, Simonds left for London “in a hired coach carrying vpp a great summe of monie in it.” He was forced to borrow because he had “lent diuers summes freelie” to individuals who had promised repayment: “but diuers failed mee soe as I now fell shorte betweene foure & fiue hundred pounds” of what was owed to Richard. Since he had promised some £120,000 “in bonds & counterbonds” at the outset, he would have had to borrow on a huge scale in London if he could not produce the required payment on his brother’s birthday. He knew that his credit was good enough to do that if he had to. But because his “scruple” was that he believed “it not lawfull to giue or take vse [interest],” he “could not borrow the ordinarie way.” Fortunately, his brother-in-law Wiseman Bokenham lent him £600, some of which he repaid in Suffolk and some of which he made available to Bokenham in London later. He also received a loan from his stepmother, Lady Denton. On October 14, he and Richard began the accounting process and completed it on the eighteenth. On that afternoon, “I had a generall release from my brother; and the next day my great bond out of the prerogative court [of Canterbury], blessing God that had freed mee out of this great trouble.” He told Richard that “hee could not bee moore ioyfull to receiue his estate, then I was, to be ridd of the care and trouble of it.”29

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peripatetic again Besides the troubles involved in looking after Richard, Simonds and Anne faced another dilemma in 1633. In 1632, Charles I reissued a proclamation that required members of the gentry to reside in their counties rather than in London. The goal, as Kevin Sharpe described it, was a “reform of local society by a reinvigoration of traditional modes of government” by putting a stop to “the waste of gentry estates in the capital.” The first such proclamation had been issued by Elizabeth I in 1596, so it was not a new idea. But Charles’s decision to enforce it energetically was an innovation, and the £1,000 fine levied against William Palmer in the Court of Star Chamber in November 1632 came as a shock to Simonds and many others.30 He sought advice on whether Islington was considered a part of London from his neighbor, Sir Thomas Coventry (the Lord Keeper), who told him that Islington “was not within the letter of the proclamacion nor the intencion of it neither.” Coventry erred, because Simonds received a summons to appear before the Court of Star Chamber early in 1633 “for not residing in the country.” Thus he was forced to cease his study of historical documents in London and subject his pregnant wife to the dangers of a winter journey back to Suffolk. This was a costly decision because he had already procured his “prouisons for housekeeping for the yeare ensuing & neuer imagined my selfe to bee in danger.”31 Stow Hall, however, was occupied until Michaelmas by Lady Denton. He rented part of a house in Bury St. Edmunds near the church where Edmund Calamy preached, and they looked forward to his sermons and “frequent conuerse” with him. Indeed, his presence “was one of the cheife motiues that drew vs thither to partake of his painfull [painstaking] & pious preaching.”32 After a visit to Albury Lodge, the family moved to Bury on December 15. Around seven in the morning on Sunday March 10, 1633, Anne gave birth to twin boys, but they came a month prematurely. Little Anne had come down with the measles on February 25 and recovered in just a few days. But her mother, being pregnant, greatly feared that she would contract the same illness. Simonds thought that this fear may have hastened the “fatal abortion,” as he called it, meaning the early birth of the twins. In addition, he suspected “that she had receiued some hurte by trauailing in her coach in Burie streetes.”33 They named the older child Adrian and the younger Geerardt, but “the discouerie of some certaine symptomes of death” in Geerardt led Simonds to have the infant baptized at home before the service began on that morning. The child died just hours after his baptism and was buried in the grave with his elder brother Clopton in the chancel at Lavenham on March 12, his body having been transported

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in Simonds’s coach on the day of his birth. Adrian was baptized at Bury the next day, the witnesses being Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston and Wiseman Bokenham. On March 11, Simonds had to go to London to deal with legal matters, and he left “well hoping of the continuance of the life of my little Adrian.” When Simonds returned from London “verie wet and weary” on March 15, he found that “God, in his infinite wisdome and goodnes had otherwaies decreed.” He found his “deare wife all in teares and lamentations,” and although he himself felt staggered by his “own extreame losses, . . . yet I comforted her what I might, and concealed part of my grief & disconsolacion from her.” Adrian’s corpse had joined his brothers in Lavenham on the previous day.34 On June 24, 1633, the D’Ewes family moved from Bury to Stow Hall, and they shared it until early November with Lady Denton.35 She then moved just a mile and a half north to Ixworth Abbey, where she lived with her sister, the widowed Lady Stuteville. “This was the first time since my fathers decease,” Simonds exulted, “that wee enioied our sweete & pleasant seate freelie & whollie to our selues.” But they could not “take too much comforte in it, nor grow too farre in loue with it” because of the malice of their worm in the bud, Richard Damport. The rector “had wasted much monie with mee in seueral suites” since Paul had died, and he “practised dailie newe and malicious deuices to vex vs.” The D’Eweses were on the verge of being, once again, “driuen, for verie peace & quiet sake, to forsake our mansion howse & dwelling” when Damport suddenly changed his tune for a time “and offered peace and respectfull observancie vnto vs.”36 In an undated Latin letter probably written about this time, Simonds expressed hope that the lawsuits between them “might be broken off by a formula of steady compromising” and that Damport “might be amongst vs for dinner.”37 Simonds speculated as to the reasons for the parson’s volte-face, impermanent though it proved to be. Perhaps, he suggested, Damport was simply “wearied with his owne monstrous ingratitude to mee” and the distressing “dailie differences” that ensued. More likely, he may have worried that he would find himself the target of “the curses of the poore in towne & cuntrie” if he drove away the D’Ewes family “by whose hospitalitie & outward workes of mercie manie weere refreshed.” Simonds wrote that he regretted having to discuss Damport’s “malitious practices” in his autobiography, but “the necessitie of setting downe a full & true Relation of the good and euill euents & passages of mine owne life enforceth me to it.”38 From June 1633 until April 1634, the truce with Damport held, but then it ended in a spectacular manner. Simonds had been busily pursuing his “precious studies,” but he found himself stymied by the behavior of the rector. Damport had “forborne to catechize in the afternoones” on

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Sundays, even though canon law required it. It is not clear whether he complained to Damport about this matter, but he hinted that this was the concern that provoked the rector, “meerelie out of his spleene to mee,” to insert “some malicious sprinklings” into his sermons. Not until Sunday, April 13, 1634, however, did he “breake out into open inuective, and a profanation of the Church & pulpit with downe right railing.” On that fateful morning, he delivered what Simonds called a “wicked discourse vnworthie the name of a sermon.” Clearly, he took what Damport said as an overt personal attack. After this performance, Simonds was told “by some hott spirits” to denounce Damport before the Court of High Commission. Ever cautious and knowing, as he put it, “reuenge to bee costlie, and forgiunes cheape,” he went to see the bishop of Norwich, Richard Corbet, on April 22. He reported that Corbet “seemed verie sensible of my wrongs & promised mee redresse but like an Arch-Hypocrite, failed mee whollie in the issue.” Simonds hinted that Damport had bribed Corbet, but whether or not that was the case, he resolved “neuer to haue recourse to his wicked iniustice againe.” He decided to move his family away from Stow Hall again, but once again Damport suddenly retreated. On November 5, upon what terms we are not told, the truce was reinstated. Despite Corbet’s treacherous behavior, Simonds chose “to passe by all the wrongs and iniuries” that Damport had inflicted.39 He did not, however, forget his ire against Corbet; in a Latin letter to Damport’s eventual successor at St. George Stowlangtoft, George Speed, he characterized the bishop as “the most wicked of all bipeds.”40 Long aligned with the anti-Calvinists, Corbet might have taken pleasure in frustrating a Puritan such as Simonds.41 bereft parents By the following summer, Damport’s “malitious practices continuing, although hee catechized some Sundays in the afternoons,” Simonds decided that Anne’s pregnancy should come to its conclusion at Ixworth Abbey rather than Stowlangtoft. She there gave birth to her fourth son on the afternoon of Friday, July 18. They named him Clopton, and the witnesses at the baptism in the church at Ixworth were Simonds’s brother Richard, his brother-in-law Sir Thomas Bowes, and his sister Grace Bokenham. Then the woeful history more or less repeated itself, although more slowly this time. During the ensuing fortnight, two nurses proved unable to feed the baby, and this forced them to hire a “poore woman” who had been badly treated “& almost starued by a wicked husband.” As if this were not enough, she was herself “of a proud fretting, & wayward disposicion.” Little Clopton, “our most sweete & tender infant,” therefore got off to a poor start because of his “often sucking of her malignant & distempered milke.”42 On April 3,

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1635, when he was nearly nine months old, Clopton suffered “a conuulsion fitt,” even though he had until then been of “a most venust [handsome, comely] & chearefull, sweete countenance.” Simonds concealed the occurrence of this fit from Anne. Then the child had another one, and they decided to consult an Italian physician named Dr. Desputine in Bury St. Edmunds. In retrospect, they concluded that they had followed “too farre his vnskilfull & vnfortunate aduice,” for Clopton contracted rickets as well.43 Simonds’s letters to Joachimi provide more detail. On June 10, he reported that after the convulsions continued for three weeks and Desputine had not found a way to stop them, he “opened a ‘fluxion’ in the neck, by which we hope to cure the burning humour in the brain.”44 In his next letter, on July 9, Simonds described the results that had followed this procedure. The little boy had, of course, been “most impatient” and “in tears” during the surgery, but he had “experienced much relief thence, and, already, the flowing away of the most corrupt bile.” Although he was “not completely free of the convulsions,” there was hope that these might be “the indications of a gentler illness, as if it were languishing, rather than the illness itself.” The letter also contained the news that Anne was pregnant again and that the “unheard of drought amongst us” had been broken with an “abundant rain” that God had decreed, a rain that “made the peas and barley, sown somewhat late and almost dead, to resurge in many places.”45 The sad story of Clopton’s decline continued in Simonds’s August 13, 1635, letter to Joachimi It related that eleven weeks had passed since Desputine’s fluxion, but “new convulsions” had occurred. “But today, laboring three times with the same agony, while looking at me with wild eyes, . . . between kisses and embraces, with trembling hand and contorted head for a time, he lost consciousness itself.” Simonds explained that he was writing while Clopton was sleeping, albeit badly. Simonds was striving to “be absent from him as little as I am able, under this dark cloud which has spread far and wide.” Debate proceeded as to whether “more copious fluxions” should be attempted, whether the milk that had come from the wetnurse who “had a disturbed mind” was the source of the trouble, and whether he should be weaned. Weaning usually occurred by age two, but Clopton had only “two teeth (on the lower gum)” and thus lacked “adequate instruments for eating.”46 An undated letter from Jone Ellyott can be assigned to this period because it addressed Clopton’s symptoms and was almost certainly a response to a plea from Simonds and Anne for advice. Jone described fits that her children had suffered and the advice they had received from Sir Theodore Mayerne about whether it was the best course to let them suck again after they had been weaned. Jone reported that for her children “a broune ruddy complectioned woman” was the best wetnurse.

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Their cousin Charles Lathum recommended “waters and powder,” which had helped his children when they had similar troubles. Jone had been so afraid when her daughter had convulsions that she had always kept “something, good for those fits” close at hand. She expressed her hope that “my sweete cossen shall no more feele the teror of that cruell disease” and opined that “our gracious god is not tide to any thing his mercy being ouer all his workes.”47 Simonds’s September 26 letter to Joachimi mentioned that they had come to believe, as Dr. Desputine had suspected, that “it is, and always was, epilepsy. For yesterday and not today, the fluxion emitted a corrupted bile,” but they seemed to gain some comfort upon learning that infants could recover from this illness.48 Just over a month later, he wrote again to Joachimi to report some good news: “My son has, by the highest mercy of God, been free from convulsions after his weaning.”49 On November 24, 1635, Anne was “bigg with childe and neare her time, and much affrighted.” As they sat together by the fire in their “little parlour,” she “suddenlie felt that sanguineous humour which vsuallie followed the birth of her former children to issue in some abundance from her.” She was afraid that this “would be fatall to herselfe or her childe.” She then slept and gave birth on the evening of the 25th. Anne was well, but the baby was very ill. Apprehensive that the child would soon die, Mr. Damport was called to baptize her as “Sissilia” in Anne’s chamber soon after the birth. Yet Sissilia lived and was “a great comforte to us,” as Simonds said when he finished writing his autobiography in 1638.50 On November 26, Simonds rode with Sir William Poley to Poley’s home, Boxted Hall, and on December 1 he wrote to his brother Richard at the Middle Temple to report the welcome news of the baby’s arrival. He told Richard that they had “named her Sissilia to renew the memory of her godly grandmother.”51 Boxted Hall is a late-fourteenth-century moated manor house situated a few miles south of Bury and west of Lavenham. Poley had married Simonds’s youngest sister, Elizabeth (Betty), on March 15, 1636.52 That happy event was followed by the not unexpected but still tragic loss of Clopton on May 9 at Stow Hall. For the last few months of his short life, he continued to have epileptic fits, slept poorly, and suffered from rickets. Indeed, he had forty-four convulsions between April 3, 1635, and March 4, 1636. Simonds acknowledged that “all persons of iudgment that saw him” found no reason to think he would survive, but he and his “deare wife still fedd our selues with hope, that hee might recouer.” Around two in the afternoon on Sunday, May 8, Clopton suffered a fit, but Simonds, “fearing noe great danger,” went to church at nearby Hunston (thereby evading Damport). Returning after five, he saw the child have two more

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fits within a few minutes of each other. This was worrying, because none of the preceding attacks had come so close together. By six the next morning, he “was assaulted with 12 fitts moore, amongst which some weere so long & terrible, as his verie heart-strings seemed to breake within him. I was neare him all the time bestowing my heauie teares, deepe sighs & humble praiers vpon him.” Throughout the next morning, Clopton was mostly quiet, but at about 2 p.m. “hee rendred vpp his blessed & innocent soule into the hands of his heauenlie Father: and left mee the most sadd & disconsolate Father that possiblie could bee; soe as I had noe other comforte for the present but in my good God, on whome I looked as the author of this chasticement.” Anne had left for Albury Lodge on May 5, and Simonds considered it a mercy that she was not at Stow to witness “these terrours & dolours” he had seen, because they would “haue oppressed her tender heart.” Clopton was buried the next morning in the chancel at Stowlangtoft, “close to the west end of my fathers grauestone.”53 Three days after Clopton’s death, Simonds poured out his heart in a letter to Joachimi that contains some of the same details about the child’s final hours as the account in the autobiography but has a greater immediacy. “God has attacked me,” he wrote, with “a great attack, and has exerted (so that I might use the words of Naomi) his hand against me, by calling my only, most dear, little son, already nearly two years old, to eternal rest, from this workhouse of miseries. He, however, is happy, who has exchanged his sick life with one which brings true health, so many illnesses and sorrows having been left behind.” After the long series of convulsions, “the most sweet light” of Clopton’s eyes “clouded over,” and the vessel was broken . . . . Nor did he leave me anything but a huge desire for him and a mass of sobbing amidst almost innumerable tears. The three little sons taken away a few days after their nativity did not give rise to sadness of so great a moment as this unique one, the solace of so many vigils, prayers and kisses, who died such a cruel death.

He urged Joachimi to tell his son-in-law Mayerne to “beware in the future lest he open fluxions in the neck on his tender children.” He reported that “the fluxion, that fallacious remedy of epilepsies, was dried up three days before” the convulsions began and did nothing to ease “the atrocity of the agonies.” He conveyed these thoughts to his dear friend “in the same way” he would have to his own father, had Paul still been alive. As always in his letters to the Dutch ambassador, his thoughts turned to the Thirty Years’ War and the struggle of the United Provinces for independence: “what at home and what abroad does not provide the pious with material for sorrowing and foreboding.” Simonds was lamenting the loss of a son “torn away by death” while England was at peace, but on the Continent

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sons were “buried, fathers are slain and mothers and daughters are dishonoured.” He closed the letter praying for “a true treaty” between the English and Dutch nations that would ameliorate the “many evils threatening everywhere in the Church.”54 This numbingly painful loss of Clopton on May 9, 1636, forced Simonds to seek an explanation for it, and he concluded that “this great affliction was sent vpon mee still to humble me more & more: and to weane me from the loue of the profits & preferments of this life.” He struggled with “moore sadd presaging thoughts” that God would deny him a son “to inherit my name, & perpetuate my familie.” He therefore “begann to consider, that a higher prouidence might ere long call mee to suffer for his name & gospell, or might prepare a way for my passage into America.”55 On May 14, Simonds rode to the home of his “brother and sister Bowes” at Much Bromley in Essex, reaching there about ten in the morning and receiving their sympathy. Early that evening, Anne, accompanied by the Poleys, arrived on their way back from London. “I looked out of the South-window of the dining roome vpon her, as shee entred the inner court & saw her looke soe chearefullie and confidentlie . . . . Shee yet knew nothing of her inestimable losse, nor of my being ther.” Her countenance changed sharply as soon as she entered the dining room and saw her husband. She began “instantlie to fall a shaking, & scarce being able to speake in respect of the abundance of teares, that issued from her.” He began to speak, but she interrupted him by asking, “is the boy dead?” Having not yet “spent my store of sorrow soe farre,” he wanted to give way to “lamenting with my dearest.” But he did his best to control his “outward expressions” of grief in order to present “the best arguments I had, to mould & frame her to patience and moderacion.” He wrote that he and Anne “found the sorrow for the loss of this childe, on whome wee had bestowed soe much care & affection, & whose delicate favour & bright grey eye was soe deeplie imprinted in our hearts, farre to surpasse our greife for the decease of his three elder brothers, who dying almost as soon as they weere borne, were not soe endeared to us as this was.” When his grandfather Richard Symonds died, Simonds had noted that he had the same “bright grey eye” that little Clopton had. Simonds had ended what he called the “thirde booke” of his autobiography with his father’s death, and he chose to close the fourth and final “booke” with “the decease of my sweete & onlie sonne.”56 The kindest description that can be made of Simonds D’Ewes’s writing style is that it was stiff, lawyerly, and workmanlike. Only rarely did he achieve the kind of succinct and vivid prose that he produced in his brief but compelling story of Clopton’s death and its impact on himself and his wife. The shortlist would also include the deaths of his parents. Per-

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Fig. 4.1. The “baby brass” in front of the altar at the church of St. Peter and St. Paul in Lavenham, Suffolk. Under it lie the bodies of three of the sons born to Simonds and Ann D’Ewes. Photo by J. Sears McGee.

haps he was capable of such writing only when representing moments of deep and powerful emotion, for only then could he escape his fussy and pedantic personality and focus his attention sharply enough to write so well. Much of his mastery of detail was based on his extraordinary ability to take notes and keep records, and time and again in the autobiography and elsewhere in his papers details are piled upon details that may be interesting and significant but do not rise to the level of memorable prose. But in this account, when he saw Anne through the south window as she entered the Bowes courtyard, still oblivious to the loss that would overwhelm her the instant she saw him where he should not be if all had been well at Stow Hall, the scene he deftly sketched has a penetrating, novelistic power that is unforgettable. His grief and his desire to spare his beloved wife as much pain as he could are poignant and heartfelt. For all of his tics, faults, and obsessions, we here encounter him at his best as a loving and generous husband, father, and family man.

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The death of Clopton in 1636 occurred halfway through the parenting history of Anne and Simonds, but the fact that he ended his autobiography with it means that the remaining five children figure less prominently in the record Simonds left. He did mention the birth of Sissilia, their second daughter and sixth child, at Stow Hall on November 25, 1635, and the first child, Anne, was still living at that time.57 Another daughter, whose name I have not found, was born in the summer of 1637. Simonds wrote to Joachimi on October 2/12 to offer solace for the loss of one of the ambassador’s daughters and said that Anne had “given birth to a third daughter.”58 In his next letter to his Dutch friend, however, he reported that he and Anne were well and that she was “already nurturing the hope of a new birth in her womb now, together with the treasury of three little daughters.”59 Geva made her entrance into the world in June or July 1638, an event Simonds announced to his brother in a letter written on August 16, 1638: “God hath sent my wife a safe deliuery of a fowerth daughter.”60 Then on August 29, 1639, the fifth son arrived and was named Adrian. God, Simonds told Joachimi, had “indulged us to a fifth son when we had almost ceased to hope.” “May the Deity,” he wrote, “bring it about that that the paternal labors of so many years and the richly founded library may be of use to him.”61 In a Latin letter he wrote at the end of the month to his friend Henry Bourchier, the earl of Bath, he said that Richard Damport, the cleric who had caused him “so many troubles in relation to tithes,” had ended “his former stubbornness” and “danced for joy . . . at our son born to us.” Damport had nine children and seemed as pleased as if “he were tithed himself.”62 Sadly, the baby began having convulsions early the following April and died on June 1, 1640. Six days later, his nearly twoyear-old sister, Geva, followed him to the grave.63 Anne was to give birth one time more. “My deare loue,” she reported from Ixworth on January 17, 1641, to Simonds in London, God had “now againe the ninth time” restored her to health after the peril of childbirth: and though wee haue failed in parte of our hope by the birth of a daughter . . . let us wait patientlie on God hee will in his good time vouchsafe vs issue male if he see it good for vs. I am through his gratious prouidence proven prettie strong though I was somewhat feauerish at the beginning your third daughter with mee and your fowerth at nurse are I blesse God prettie well. Thus with my dearest affection of yow hoping shortelie to come to yow I rest. Your faithfull affectionate wife Anne D’Ewes64

The little girl “at nurse” must have been Isolda. Only she and Sissilia would still be living when Anne D’Ewes died in July 1641. Mary Page was the wetnurse who had experience looking after several D’Ewes babies. She and her husband lived in Hunston, very near Stow Hall, and she

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had received an inquiry from Simonds and Anne, then in London, about whether she could nurse the infant Anne was carrying. Her answer, written to Anne on May 10, 1639, began: “Right Worshipfull Good Madam I should be exseeding glad to see your Ladieship and that your Ladyship might see your Littel ons which I thanke God are both uery well and merie . . . I could narse your Ladieship A nother: I thanke God I haue my health and am well and haue good store of milke: and if I continew so to bee I am willing to narse your Ladieship A nother.” She added that her husband was also willing that she undertake this responsibility and that he had been to visit Sissilia and “he sayth she lookes very harty and well.” Isolda, it appears, was in good hands.65 Nevertheless, divine providence seemed to favor neither Simonds’s private nor his public hopes. It is likely that the death of Clopton and so many of his siblings forced him to think again about how to direct his energies. From 1636 until 1640, his longing to see his own family not only regain its lost status but also persist and prosper over time appeared less and less likely to be fulfilled. That prospect pushed him back on his underlying awareness that God might have plans for him that concerned the defense of true religion and required him to reconsider the value of his scholarly projects and dynastic hopes. We will turn to these matters below, but first it is necessary to complete the story of his dealings with his young brother in this period.

The Travels of Richard Having shortened Richard’s stay at Cambridge in favor of the Middle Temple—indeed much more drastically than his father had shortened his own—Simonds probably hoped that Richard would take to the study of the common law as he had, albeit after a hesitant beginning. Many young gentlemen of means studied the law for a year or two without any intention of practicing it, and Richard may have approached his legal apprenticeship in that spirit. Whatever his intention may have been at the outset, his “finishing schools” would instead be foreign travels and military service rather than the common law. His correspondence with Simonds was slender, brief, and businesslike from 1633 until 1635, probably because the brothers were often together in this interval. For example, on March 19, 1634, he wrote to tell Simonds that he was free to come to Stow Hall because his friend Sir Henry Newton had left town.66 In August, Richard must have been visiting them there because, when Simonds, Anne, Richard, and sister Betty were returning from a dinner at Viscount Savage’s home in Long Melford, the coach overturned. Richard, who was riding ahead, quickly managed to halt the horses or Simonds and the women in the coach “might haue been in great danger.”67 On October 25, 1634, Rich-

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ard wrote from London to ask his brother, then at Stow Hall, to receive £25 owing to him from “Brother Bokenham” and wanting know whether Simonds liked the “bands and cuffs” he had sent.68 Simonds usually addressed Richard as “Kinde Brother,” and Richard’s letters often began “Worthy Brother.” Then, late in the summer of 1635, Richard went to Paris. We learn from Simonds’s September 26 letter to Joachimi that his brother was staying at the house of a Dutchman named Curtein in the suburb of St. Germain. Richard had sent Simonds a letter on September 2 that was full of interesting political intelligence. Proud of Richard’s acumen and powers of observation, Simonds told Joachimi that his brother had reported that “the Royal armies especially labor with regard to food supplies, that the population is tired of war” and keen for “a general peace” with the Habsburgs in Vienna and Madrid. Simonds opined that the rumor of a peace was probably a ploy on the part of Cardinal Richelieu aimed at easing “the grievances of the people.”69 The last thing Simonds wanted at this moment was for the French to draw back from the fight against the Hapsburgs. Despite his admiration of Richard’s newsgathering ability in France, it is likely that Simonds still worried about his brother’s judgment and maturity. Otherwise, it is not easy to explain the fact that Sir William Ellyott wrote to Richard on September 30 urgently advising him “to take heed of the new wines which hath caused the deathe of many of our English gentlemen espeacyally when they ar younge, and that your stay be no longer then the springe for the first time.” Moreover, he hoped that Richard would “pitche not your thoughts for italye where ther is nothing to be obtained but daunger” and remember that in France “Orleans is held the best place both for the puritye of the language and the goodnes of the wines.”70 By November 2, Richard was back in England after three months in Paris. Simonds expressed his joy about his brother’s return and his hope that this “little experience now will make you tarrie long at home heereafter.” He reported that their youngest sister, Betty, now had two suitors, both of whom were, so far as he could discover, quite acceptable. If she married, Simonds reminded Richard that a sum that Richard held would become payable to Betty and her husband but not until her eighteenth birthday in February 1636. Simonds may have thought that Richard expected to be away longer because he said that he would “bee gladd to heare from yow what newes & why yow returned so soon.” Little Clopton, he added, “is pretily well,” and Anne was drawing “neare her time of lying downe againe. I wish yow weere as well bound to a good wife as I am, that yow might come settle by vs & multiplie.”71 Just eight days later, he wrote again to Richard at the Middle Temple to deny the report

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Richard had received to the effect that Simonds was “possesst sinisterly” concerning his love for him. The report was false, Simonds wrote, and he also provided more news about the progress of a marriage treaty for Betty. He closed by saying that if it went through that would make it even easier for Richard to move to Suffolk.72 Jone Ellyott was also engaged in the search for a husband for Betty. Jone wrote Simonds to say that “if my Lady denton and your selfe haue not a better match for my sister Betty I desire to make knowne some perticulars of one by us tis a knights sonne a young man free from vice about 3 and 20 his father will settell 13 hundred pound a yeare and offers 4 hundred pound a yeare maintenance.” This same gentleman had “another sonne who has 3 hundred pound a yeare.”73 Richard must have fallen ill because in his next letter, on December 7, 1635, Simonds conveyed hopes for his brother’s recovery and his disappointment that they had to communicate by letter instead of face-toface as he had expected. Deeply concerned as he was for Richard’s “good both of soule & body . . . I sincerely entreate yow to leaue the vanities” of London and “come & settle wth mee or some other of your freinds in the cuntry & especially if your yonger sister marrie.” But there was a problem on the marriage front because Richard in a letter to Anne had said that his “friend Digby” had proposed a “riddle” about Betty’s suitor Sir William Poley. Digby had said that Betty should “beware of her knite.” Simonds affirmed his high regard for Digby’s probity and knew him to be a man who “abhorrs backbiting.” He called upon Richard to find out whether Digby had certain knowledge of “any materiall blemish in the knite as hee calls him” and to tell Richard what it was if it in fact existed. So far as Simonds knew and as he had already told Richard, there was as yet no firm reason not to proceed, although there was still time and “a freedome still left on all sides & shall bee till ther ioyning in the church.”74 Besides the question about Poley’s worthiness, another “rubb” emerged over the money Richard owed to Betty’s “porcion.” Some details are missing but hinted at in a stern and censorious letter Simonds wrote to Richard on April 17, 1636. In it, he referred to “the letters of this weeke” that “should haue satisfied mee & haue contented yow, but your fixednes to your owne resolutions frustrates both.” He thought Richard knew of gossip that made him “take distast at mee whether deseruedly or noe I know not.” He reminded his brother that in the past he had always informed him of any reports he had received concerning his conduct, and he believed he deserved the same courtesy in return. Without such openness and honesty, “we cannot euer hope of freindly much less brotherly affection.”75 Since the marriage went ahead in May and neither difficulty was mentioned later, we can only as-

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sume that whatever questions there were about Poley and the financial commitment to Betty were resolved. Moreover, from this point until the eve of the Civil War in 1642, the correspondence of the brothers was affectionate and their regard for each other high. Simonds’s next letter to Joachimi was dated January 4, 1636, and in it he considerably amplified his account of Richard’s adventures in France: “my only brother Richard . . . has informed me” about “the most deplorable state of that kingdom” in domestic and international terms. Inside France, “all things are administered at the nod, I should say the desire” of Cardinal Richelieu, “and all the liberty both of the people and of the nobles is oppressed by innumerable new tributes . . . . New taxes have been imposed on sending letters, and on importing to Paris wine, bread, cabbages and other most cheap vegetables of this type and even on radishes.” Rebellion against wartime taxation simmered in Normandy and elsewhere, and in August it was feared that a Spanish army that was attacking Amiens would besiege Paris while the king was in Franche-Comté fighting the invading Austrian Hapsburgs. Indeed, the situation was so threatening that Richard and his friends had prepared to retreat to the English ambassador’s residence if the Spanish troops arrived. Meanwhile Richelieu was building himself a splendid chateau in the countryside near Paris, and Richard “saw the Cardinal himself walking in the garden of the same palace with five hundred attendants dressed in silk, he whom the very peers of France and even princes of the Royal blood follow with greatest reverence, lest I should say adulation.”76 On Mayday in 1636, Richard wrote from the Middle Temple to his brother at Stow Hall that their sister Jone Ellyott was in London and lodging at the earl of Wimbledon’s house in the Strand. He reported that the plague was spreading and that “a Gentleman of my very good acquaintaince” in the Inner Temple had died of it. Even so, “I never saw London so full of Gentry nor is the infecion at all thought of.” The Poleys and Bokenhams must have been visiting Stow Hall because Richard asked him to offer his “service” to his brothers-in-law and his “sweet sisters.”77 richard’s grand tour On May 2, the very next day, Richard wrote again to say that “I am with in this halfe houre to begin my Journy.”78 This was the beginning of the “trauaile” that Simonds had mentioned in the grumpy April letter discussed above. The rest of the short letter demonstrated that Richard had planned a lengthy and potentially risky excursion. He had sent a trunk containing all the documents concerning his estate to Simonds. The trunk also contained “a Box in which my will is enclosed” along with

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ten “peeces of gould” to pay legacies listed in his will. This was not to be opened “untill you haue certainety of my death. My prayers I leave with yow & I hope yowrs will be effectuall in & towards me.” He stated that he had given the key to the trunk to Sir William Poley, and if he died during his journey Simonds was to take it to Sir William to be opened. Thus commenced what would become Richard’s odyssey abroad. With one intermission back in London in 1637, it would continue until August 1640. His next letter to Simonds was written from Dort (Dordrecht) in Holland on June 21, 1636, and he related the results of his meeting with the English representative at The Hague, Sir William Boswell. Simonds had written to Boswell requesting answers to various queries, and Richard—not for the last time—was assisting the advancement of his brother’s researches. Richard closed this brief letter by stating that “my Garison is Dort” but that Simonds should write to him at “Mr Custs howse an Englishman dweling in Rotterdam.”79 The mention of his garrison is the first indication that Richard had joined the English forces serving alongside the Dutch in their struggle for independence from Spain. Further confirmation came in his next letter, which was dated September 11, 1636, and written “from the Army” on the River Maas in Gelderland. Richard seemed unaware that this was the home of his D’Ewes ancestors. He had received two letters from Simonds, one of which contained “the sad newes of my Godsonns death: which from my soule I doe most realy lament, as if the louss had binne myne owne.” This was followed by Richard’s long and detailed description of the fighting, parts of it from personal observation. At the moment, he wrote, there was little news because the army had “as yett had no action.” However, just a week earlier he had seen “a dangerous mutinie” that had begun when a Dutchman and an English gentleman were “playing at dice in the feild” and a passing Frenchman grabbed the money from the table. In the ensuing swordfight, the Frenchman and the Dutchman “ware instantly slaine vpon the place,” and when “the Scotts entered the fray,” the French “were glad to show their heeles.” As they retreated, some of the French soldiers drowned. When some firebrands were tossed into the French vessels, they responded with “as hott a salute of musketts, from the riuer.” For his part, Richard said that “it pleased God that at that time” the English troops were anchored in the river, and their officers ordered that none leave the boats even though the French fired on them. Fortunately, this shooting inflicted no damage, and when the English prepared to respond “if they shott any more,” a French officer ordered that any of his men who fired “be soundly beatene in owre sight, and afterwards clapped iyrons on them and conveighed them thence.” Richard concluded

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by describing the march into Brabant and the army’s entrenchment there while a decision was made as to whether they would go to Flanders or besiege Breda. “Vntill the Army bee dismissed I cannot in honor goe for Brussels or take a ffurther surveigh of the Cuntry,” he wrote, and then presented his “constant loue” to Simonds and Anne and his “seruice [to] all my ffreinds in Suffolke.”80 Although he promised another letter soon, he either did not write it or it went astray, and these two letters are all we have concerning the first months in the military. The only other information about this initial chapter in Richard’s army career appeared in a Latin letter that Simonds wrote to his Dutch friend Johannes de Laet in Leiden on September 29, 1640. In it he mentioned that his brother Richard had “fought in Belgium [the Low Countries] freely or at his own expense, under the tribune Goringus, who is very friendly to him.”81 This was Sir George Goring, who commanded an English regiment of infantry in the Dutch service from 1635 until he was shot in the ankle at the siege of Breda in January 1639. He would later be a prominent Royalist general during the civil wars in the British isles.82 Richard’s foray abroad lasted about ten or eleven months, for by April or May 1637 he was back in England. On May 15, he reported to Simonds on the activities of the prince of Orange in the Netherlands and on a meeting he had had in London with a representative of the Palatine court, Robert Stone. Stone had told him of the pleasure the Queen of Bohemia had expressed at reading Simonds’s letter, and his correspondence with her will be further discussed below.83 Two days later, Richard mentioned his discussion with Mr. “Wakerly” at Whitehall. This was the German poet, representative of the Palatinate, and later German secretary to the Privy Council in England, George Weckherlin. Richard conveyed Weckherlin’s thanks “for the coppy of the deede yow sent him.” Richard also resumed his role as a sort of purchasing agent for his kinfolk in the country. He mentioned that he had “bought many things on Wensday at the Exchange for my sisters” that he would soon arrange to send to them. The sometimes fraught process of shopping in London becomes apparent in this letter because he said that during his visit to the Exchange, he had not had his servant with him and thus had to leave the purchased items in the shop for collection later. He sent the servant for them the next morning, but because it was a holiday the “shoppes were shut vpp.” The items would, Richard promised, be sent “the next weeke when with out faile I will send them all together.”84 In his May 26 letter, he stated that the goods had been sent “in a box this weeke” and “if any thing be misliked Returne it and it shall be changed.”85 He seems to have continued to fulfill his kinfolk’s wishes in this way. In May, 1640, Grace sent him greetings and love

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and asked him to get her “a good and trew going striking clock and with strong springs hoping it will bee not oftten out of frame.” And she hoped it would not cost more than £10.86 By the autumn of 1637, Richard was making preparations for another trip to the Continent. In October, he wrote from his chamber in the Middle Temple to Anne to say that he was very pleased to hear from John Stuteville that she was in good health but regretting that some three or four letters he had written to her and a gift (“a Poore token”) had miscarried due to an error “by the Thetford carriour.” He also understood that she was soon to visit her Aunt Brograve and that he would be sure to visit her at Albury Lodge “if I bee then in Englande.” He averred that he “would not willingly take this journy with out first seeinge yow whom I so treuly Loue & respect.”87 By October 24, the letters and the box had been retrieved from Thetford, and Simonds wrote to Richard to thank him for it and “the liberall remembrance” it contained for Anne.88 On November 23, Richard wrote a letter very similar to the one he had sent shortly before his previous trip with instructions about the handling of his revised will should he die while abroad and about other bits of unfinished business, such as receiving the money from a bond from “Brother Bowes.” He reiterated that he “should be gladd som time to heare ffrom yow and serve yow in any thing I can in Paris.”89 By early January 1638, Richard was in Paris and wrote to tell Anne that he would make every effort to deserve the “allready recieued fauors” from her: “Promises are allways to be kept, nor shall mine ever bee broken with yow whome I so much respect, and loue . . . . My happiness rests in confidence yow beleeve what I profess is reall.”90 As was frequently the case, this letter was enclosed with another to his brother to inquire about the two pictures he wanted Richard to find in Paris. He asked that letters to him be sent “to Mr Roger Wotton at the George in Lumber Street,” and Wotton would then send them on to Richard.91 On February 2/12, he wrote to Simonds to report that as instructed he had arranged to obtain pictures of his brother’s French heroes, the historian and memoirist J. A. de Thou and Gaspard de Coligny, the Huguenot leader and most famous victim of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in Paris in 1572. He had visited de Thou’s house and learned from the great man’s sons-in-law that the “latest and best” picture of the historian was the one that was in his “study Chamber.” Richard arranged with them to send the picture for copying by “one of the best workemen in Paris” and also to pay the copyist before he left the city.92 He wrote again on February 16/26 to assure Simonds of the falsity of “the report you heard of my being cast away at sea.” There had indeed, he explained, been a group of

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Englishmen who had set out for France in a bark when the winds were “then contrary for ffrance. The Passangers were so negligent that they omitted to carry prouision with them to sea,” and as a result “they all suffred extreamely by hunger.” Richard promised not to make the same mistake so that he could continue to serve his brother, and he indicated that he had obtained the required image of de Thou and expected to have that of Coligny soon.93 On the eve of setting out for La Rochelle on March 15, 1638, Richard mentioned that he had tried to see de Thou’s son, but he was not at home. The visit, however, proved fruitful, because two of de Thou’s kinsmen, which haue the commande, and vse of all his Bookes, shewed me his seuerall Libraries beautefied with many picturs of such late men, as haue binn fam’d eyther for learning, or valour. & in one presse (which they shewed me, as a thing more rare then the rest) was eight hundred Manuscripts the most part of them originalls. I must confesse I then wished yow with me, for all sorts of learning, for thear alike curiositie in binding, and the contriuance in placing them I neuer yet saw the like.

This statement nicely exemplifies Richard’s understanding of his brother’s scholarly and bibliophilic passions. As we shall see, Simonds’s admiration for de Thou led him to do his best to recapitulate in his own library the features of de Thou’s. These exchanges represent the pattern that would characterize the remainder of Richard’s travels because he found himself on many occasions trying to track down pictures, manuscripts, collectors, and antiquarians in which or in whom his brother was interested. He concluded this letter with a brief statement of his agenda in France: “I am now taking my iourny from Orleans toward Rochell, and so making the great rounde of France.”94 The pictures of Coligny and de Thou did arrive eventually. In July 1639, Simonds wrote to Joachimi urging him to have a portrait made of himself at Simonds’s expense so that it could grace the library at Stow Hall. It would join those of other “very famous men” he had obtained, and he named Sir Robert Cotton (“once upon a time most dear to me”), Coligny (“crowned with martyrdom in the year of Our Lord 1572 at Paris”), and “the incomparable man Auguste Thuanus.”95 “Deare brother yow much enhappie mee by often writing,” Simonds wrote on March 6/16, 1638 “& verie gladd I shall bee to receaue the two pictures of those two excellent men.” He was devoting much attention to the furnishing and decoration of his growing library, and the pictures were an important part of this effort. He reported the death of their friend and Suffolk neighbor Sir William Spring, and he asked a new favor of Richard. “Ther is one learned gentleman & a great Antiquarie called Monsier du Chesnay latelie living at Paris,” and he asked Richard to determine

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if Duchesne was still there and if so to pay “him a visit & show him this enclosed note & know if this chronicle bee printed that is mencioned in it which hee did promise to publish long since when hee printed Ordericus Vitalis & other Norman writers.” A postscript in the margin called upon Richard to purchase and send a copy of Duchesne’s chronicle “either in quires or readie bound vpp & send it mee” if the work had in fact been printed.96 In a letter that has not survived, Simonds must have written to Richard on February 12 because Richard referred to it in his of March 8/18. Simonds wanted to be certain that his collection of the published writings of de Thou was complete. Richard had looked into the matter and found that his brother did indeed have the full complement, although he was mistaken when he thought the books had been printed at Orleans. This was because “the Papists will not bye any if they haue their impression from thence, which maks them counterfit the place.” Richard then turned to a lengthy report containing political news and gossip which will be discussed below along with his remarks on such matters in other letters written during his wanderings.97 The next letter from Richard was undated but probably written in April 1638, by which time he was on the move again. Writing from Bordeaux, he responded to letters Simonds had written on March 27 and April 2. He informed Simonds that he had received a courteous response from Duchesne and would see him when he returned to Paris. He was also surprised and worried that Simonds had not yet received the pictures, but when they arrived they could be distinguished from each other by the fact that Coligny’s arms displayed a coronet and de Thou’s did not. Since he was about “to make all possible speed for Geneua,” it is obvious that the visit with the French antiquarian would have to wait a while. Nor was he traveling alone, because he added that “owre companie is stronge.” This letter also contained the first indication that Richard had become aware of the threat of trouble back in Britain, because he mentioned the Prayer Book Rebellion in Scotland.98 On May 18/28, Richard wrote to say that he had not received any letters from Simonds since he was in Bordeaux. His agent in Paris, a Mr. Marchand, had sent word of “tooe Pacquetts, one directed to Burdeaux, the other to Montpelier,” but they came after he left those places. Meanwhile he had found a collector there who possessed “all sorts of Meddalls & Roman Coynes” and he would try to purchase whatever Simonds told him he wanted.”99 On August 6/16, a concerned Simonds wrote to Richard at Lyons to say that, lacking any response from three or four letters, he was fearful that “yow are not well.” If he should die, then there would “bee an end of my name familie & line. God hath sent my wife a safe deliuerie of a fouerth daughter.” He urged his brother

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to be “moore carefull of your owne safetie & returne then otherwise perhaps yow would bee.”100 italy, geneva, and the homeward turn What Simonds did not know in August 1638 when he wrote urging his brother to protect his health was that Richard was already exercising caution. He had not only delayed his trip to Geneva but also left Lyons because the plague had come there as well and to other towns on the way to Paris. As he had indicated earlier, he had been “advised to make hast for Italy, which course had I not timely taken, I should with much difficulty haue gott from Lions, and hardly should I haue been reciued any wheare else.” He had sailed to Livorno and then made his way to Florence. He planned to stay either there or at Siena or Perugia until the winter. “If in these parts I may serue yow I shall study to be carefull of your commands.” He was also seeking advice about where to find “the ablest Painters.”101 His choice seems to have been Florence, because on September 10/20 he wrote from there to answer questions about several matters of business such as the lease of a meadow and the payment of a bond by “my brother Bowes.” This was, he explained, one of the first letters he had written in many weeks because God had decided to “visitt me with a dangerous and violent burning Feaver of which I haue binn sicke allmost two Months.” Finally, “the same hande that puld me downe hath out of mercy raised me upp.” Moreover, “Gods mercy was greate to us in oure departure from Lions,” because only four days after it the plague “broke out in the same house where wee lay.”102 From Florence he went to Rome, and a letter he wrote to Simonds in January 1639 expressed his frustration at “the difficulty of safe conuighing” letters to England, because he had written several to his brother and other family members that must have gone astray. He had therefore seized “the occasion of a friends goeing for London” to make sure that his letter reached its target. He asked Simonds to “salute in my behalfe my sisters Bokenham Bowes, & Polye” and their spouses and to tell them he had directed “scribbles to euery of them, & rest vncertaine that any has binn recieued.” Although, he continued, “Rome at present affords little newes,” he provided tales of Spanish conspiracy in Milan and the efforts of pirates and Turks in the Mediterranean against the Venetians. He concluded with an account of the evening that he and several of his friends “ware brauely feasted by the Colledge of English Jesuites heere in Rome: theare intertainement giuen vs speakes them rich, or pridigall.” In an effort to convert their visitors, the Jesuits had delivered “wholsum councell (yow may coniecture) though none of vs were so wise to follow it.”103

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By early February 1639, Richard was at Messina in Sicily, and he wrote to Simonds on January 27/February 3, the day he was to board a galley for Malta. He complained that since he had reached Italy he had written often but had received no letters from Stow Hall and was thereby “discorreged . . . from wrighting.” He hoped that this letter would enjoy “a safe coming to your hands.”104 The next letter Richard wrote—or at least the next one that reached his brother—originated in Venice, and he referred to several letters from Simonds he had received in Naples, probably in March and April. This one was dated May 14/24, by which time he had been in Venice for a week. Simonds seems to have requested that Richard have a portrait of himself painted in Venice, and Richard dutifully obeyed. He joked that his “familiar freinds” claimed that “tis so like me tis the worse for it.” The painting was within just “halfe an hower of finishing,” after which he would send it to England and “leave the Painter to your judgment.” After reciting news of the Habsburgs, Turks, Persians, and Venetians, he closed by stating that “wee heare the Ciuill broiles in England grow worse” and praying that peace would prevail there. “My best Loue & Service to my Noble Sister & your selfe.”105 He wrote again from Venice on May 24/June 3 to tell Simonds he was heading for Geneva via Milan and Turin. After that he hoped to “speedily sett forwarde for England” if he could get through France safely. If he could not go through Savoy, he would instead return by sea to Italy and then back home via Spain.106 On June 19/29 Richard reached Geneva for on that day he wrote to Simonds and told him that the portrait from Venice was on its way. The journey from Milan to Geneva had been difficult because of a shortage of horses that forced them often to walk or to ride two “to a horse, mule or what other Creature we founde that would be so kinde to carry us.” He and his companions became ill because “for wante of wine” they had had “to drinke the Could Snow water that plentifully tumbled from the Mountains.” Yet the hot weather generated “a violent feavor coming on me, which by a speedy Letting bloud” along with “some other remedyes that a late dangerous experience taught me” resulted in a quick return to good health. His stay in Geneva would, he related, be brief because with the exception of “Monsieur Diodati . . . with one or tooe more” ministers, the “commodity of Preaching” available there was disappointing. Giovanni Diodati, an eminent Calvinist scholar who had translated the Bible into Italian, was professor of theology at the university in Geneva and the uncle of John Milton’s friend Charles Diodati. Milton visited the elder Diodati (probably in early June) on his way back to England after a fifteen-month trip that included many of the same stops Richard had made (including Venice, Florence, and the English College of the Jesuits in

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Rome). Perhaps young Milton, like Richard and his group, was also anxious about the Scottish rebellion against Charles I at home. As Richard put it, “Wee can heare no newes from Englande but such as the advizos aforde the latest allways contradicting the preceeding, that beeing the subiect of all mens talke, & owre inquirye.”107 Late in July 1639, Richard was back in Lyons, having left Geneva not long before with the intention of hurrying back to England. But the latest news he had obtained suggested that peace had been restored there, so if that remained the case he told Simonds he would remain abroad for a time.108 He must have had had in mind the Pacification of Berwick that had ended the First Bishops’ War in June. By August 10/20, 1639, he was south of Paris in Orleans and wrote to ask about the health of Simonds and Anne and stated his intention to winter in Brussels. He also wanted Simonds to know this in time to send him any new tasks there (such as remaining questions concerning the D’Ewes genealogy). He assured his brother that in that quest he would be “as diligent, and desirous as your selfe, since it concernes me equally.”109 The frustrations and confusions that emanated from his occasionally unpredictable movements and the delays in the post loom large in his letter from Orleans on September 19/29. He wrote that one of Simonds’s letters that had been sent to Florence had finally caught up with him in Orleans. Richard had guessed that it contained Simonds’s response to a question he had asked his brother from Rome about where his coat of arms and the inscription on the portrait should be placed. Simonds wanted them on the right side, but by the time the answer came it was too late because the picture was finished. Richard explained that the painting had to be “well dryed, before it was cased vpp” for shipping or it might have been “endammadged by the portage.” Richard thought it would be easy for Simonds to have them added after the work arrived. This statement was followed by a cri de coeur: “I am sorry so few of my Letters” had had the “good fortune” to arrive at Stow Hall, because it meant their communications about many matters had been muddled. He promised to renew his contact with James Battyer, the secretary to the earl of Leicester who was England’s ambassador to France, about the transmission of Simonds’s letters to Duchesne—assuming that Battyer still held that position. Richard was also troubled by the realization that many of the friends to whom he had written letters that had not been received “would take it unkindly” that he had not written, and he asked his brother to convey his regrets.110 Richard wrote again on October 10/20 to say that he had “with a reall glad harte” received Simonds’s news of Anne’s “safe deliuery of a Sonne whose life I pray to continew,” not least because of his own averseness to

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marriage for himself.111 Richard, who was still in Orléans late in October, wrote to say that he was delighted to learn that the “breach” with Damport had been resolved. “I hartely pray,” he said in closing, “for my Cozen Adrians health & my euer loued sisters up rising” after her lying-in for his birth.112 Simonds replied to three of Richard’s letters from Orleans on October 19/29, 1639.113 Doubtless buoyed by the birth of his son Adrian and the lad’s health during the early months of his life, Simonds’s mood was warm and jocular. He dismissed concerns about the dating and transmission of letters, saying that it mattered little “as long as wee have the substance conveied in them, which is the vnderstanding of each others wellfares, & the moore firmelie vniting of that nearnes nature hath knitt vs together by.” Unfortunately, the portrait of Richard made in Venice had not yet come to Stow Hall, but Simonds blamed the delay on Wotton’s long absence from London. This resulted from the fact that the merchant had been in Suffolk, “laying close seige heere at my neighbour Howlets daughter.” Rumors were circulating about the way Wotton was describing his wealth, and Simonds wrote that if Wotton actually possessed “halfe soe much hee is a richer man then I tooke him for.” Of Richard’s plan to go to Brussels, Simonds urged him to “let your safetie bee the carde & compass of all your peregrinations.” If Richard reached Brussels, Simonds would then send instructions “for the further vindication of our Dearest Ancestors.” As Richard knew, he continued, “the eclipses & interrupted depressions of our familie weere verie great” during the middle of the sixteenth century, but he would not “for a world adulterate any thing to bee an enemie to Truth which is the maine end of all my searches publike & priuate.” As to Richard’s wishes for young Adrian, Simonds welcomed them and expressed his hope that God would eventually “crowne yow with the same happines.” He concluded the letter by stating that “wee are all heere generallie alsoe possessed with new feares & saddnes” because of the way that “affaires in Scotland hasten apace to a new rupture, & both sides I feare will speedilie prepare for warre.”114 No later than November 24, 1639, Richard was in Paris, for on that day he received Simonds’s October 29 letter. In the response he wrote the same day, he reported that he had ransacked bookshops without success to find a printed edition of Duchesne’s Chronicon.115 In his next letter, written on November 20/30, he said that he had finally seen the elusive antiquarian and delivered the letter he had been carrying from Simonds to him. Duchesne had explained that the “Chronicon” had not been printed and that he would write an answer to Simonds’s questions soon. Simonds’s November 15/25 letter related that “all things in Scotland hasten on apace to distraction & tumult.” Fortunately, he and Anne were “in good health with

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our five children.”116 Richard responded that the ambassador had told him that the Scottish situation was “much mended” since the earl of Traquair had come to London.117 On December 19/29, Richard sent a brief letter in which he enclosed the response to his brother’s questions for Duchesne, a response the Frenchman had written in French because, as he put it, he could see from the request that Simonds understood French. Richard also said that he intended to remain in Paris for another six weeks.118 On the next day at Stow Hall, Simonds drafted a letter to Richard in which he expressed fear that Traquair’s arrival at the royal court “hath made the busines much worse not better. I see noe likelihood but of dismall & intestine warrs, if God doe not miraculouslie prevent it.” He had heard that Richard’s portrait was now in the hands of the framer, and Simonds had written to him with instructions about how to proceed. “God bring yow safe home,” he concluded, “& in these last these worst & ominous dayes continue our liues to bee comforts each to other.”119 What he could not have foreseen at this point was that his brother, after his return to England in the summer of 1640, would join the army that King Charles I was preparing to march north against the Covenanters who had rebelled against him in Scotland.

The Scholarly Collector When his twin sons died within days of each other in 1633, Simonds D’Ewes recalled that in order “to mitigate & moderate this sorrow I fell close to my sweete & satisfying studies.”120 In May 1634, he found himself still distracted by the continuing struggle to execute his father’s will, “which whollie hindred mee from my pretious studies.”121 More evidence of his devotion to his research projects appeared in a phrase that occurs repeatedly in his autobiography. In June 1634, he wrote that despite the fact that he managed to spend most of the month pursuing his studies, he also “lost much time in iournies discourses & visits.”122 Despite such distractions, he nevertheless spent enormous amounts of time pursuing his studies and from time to time adding new ones during the 1630s. On Wednesday, April 27, 1631, just five days after the delayed burial of his father, he found himself deploying his learning and fulfilling an obligation created by his father’s demise at the same moment. He conducted a manorial court session at which he delivered a speech before his steward and the assembled tenants of Lavenham manor. In his recollection, the speech was “exceedinglie approoued by them all” and that justified his insertion of it in his autobiography. Some might imagine that the farmers scratched their heads and suppressed laughter as they listened, hatless, while the new landlord sprinkled Latin words into his discourse. We should, how-

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ever, be careful not to underestimate the understanding of men whose interests, especially concerning their rents and entry fines that their heirs would have to pay, might be directly affected by some of the things their scholarly young new landlord announced. To be sure, Simonds was one of the few landowners in the realm who could quote directly from the Domesday Book from his own reading of it about the history of a manor, but we ought not rule out the possibility that some of his tenants might also take pride in Lavenham manor’s great antiquity. His first sight of Domesday had occurred just over a year earlier in the Tower, and he may well have turned first to the entries concerning manors that the D’Ewes family had acquired when he began his long process of taking notes from it. Simonds’s clear and well-organized ten-minute speech was in four parts. First, he presented his view, based upon “that learned Judge Fitz-herbert and seconded by that great Antiquarie,” William Lambarde, that “the ancient tenure of copyholders, begann with the Norman conquest.” He dismissed the notion that “the Bastard William” had not changed Saxon tenurial practices, and he said that he had discovered “abundance of proofe” in numerous reliable works and most importantly in “DOMESDEI remaining in the Treasurie of the Kings Exchecquer which is plaine in this point.” This work was the “Autographical Recorde . . . in two volumes in parchment” which was completed six centuries earlier. This proved “the antiquitie as well of copiholders as of mannours.” Secondly, he turned to “this great and ancient mannour of Lauenham, . . . the flower & garland of my estate.” Lavenham, he maintained, was among the oldest manors in England. During the Saxon era it had been in two sections, one “lesser” and the other “greater.” The lesser was held before the Conquest by a Saxon named Alwy. One Frodo, a brother of the Norman abbot of Bury St. Edmunds, had gotten it from William after 1066. William gave the greater to Aubrey de Vere, the first of a long line of earls of Oxford. They held it until Edward Vere, the Elizabethan earl, sold it. At some point that Simonds had not yet been able to identify, the Veres had obtained the lesser manor, and so the two sections had been united ever since. If any of the tenants were bored by the ancient history, they would surely have pricked up their ears when Simonds entered upon his third topic. Since he had title to Lavenham, as he explained, both by purchase and by descent from his father, he was free to change the way he dealt with the tenants in certain respects. His father had followed the practice of his immediate predecessors by treating those “of the Vpland” differently than the “burgage” copyholders. The entry fines of the latter were fixed at a sum equal to double their quitrents, whereas the uplanders’ fines were “at the will of the Lorde.” Paul D’Ewes had insisted upon

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“two yeares value” as his fine from the upland tenants. Simonds defended Paul’s practice on the grounds that he had bought the manor “at a verie deare rate” and that the practice of treating uplanders differently was long established. But Simonds announced that he would “abate somewhat” of his “power & due” with all tenants in the future in the matter of fines and other services. Putting “the loue of my tenants beyond my profit,” he would continue to treat all tenants in the same way so long as they met their obligations to him. We must imagine the “vplanders” welcoming this announcement and hoping that he would prove as good as his word. These obligations were his last subject, and he defined them as due to him by “three seuerall ties, of an Oath, of Service, and of Rent.” He called upon his tenants for “true fidelitie against the backbiter, due presentment against the delinquent, & Just paiment against the defrauder.” He promised in return “all the loue and fauour that lies in my power to shew yow,” and he concluded with “that of the Poet; Sic mihi contingat viuere sicque mori.” The poet was Ariosto, and the meaning was “So may it befall me to live, and so to die.”123 sir robert cotton’s demise Just seven weeks after his father’s death came the demise of Simonds’s “kinde acquaintance” and mentor in collecting and antiquarian pursuits, Sir Robert Cotton. Cotton was just over sixty years of age when he died on May 6, 1631. Simonds fondly remembered the “manye houres of discourse” he had enjoyed with Cotton about “the studie of Recordes, . . . the treasuring & storing vpp of ancient coines, and elder or later Manuscripts & Autographs as well as originall Letters of State, as olde Deedes & writings.” Cotton was also “admirablie skilled in the Politey & gouerment of the State & Church of England.” Indeed, his mind contained so much knowledge that “his toung being vnable to vtter his inward conceits & notions fast enough,” he often was driven to a “long stuttering when he endeauoured to speake exceeding fast.” There had been rumors that Cotton had been “a Pontifician,” but Simonds countered that “hee was a most sound theoricall Protestant, and hath in my hearing most vehementlie & learnedlie opposed the Romish abominations.” Cotton had, in fact, clearly stated that a “Tridentine Papist” could not “bee saued; that is a Papist firmelie holding all the damnable Decrees of the Councell of Trent.” Simonds conceded that Cotton’s behavior had not accorded with “that religion hee had approoued in his iudgment” because for many years he had been “a miserable pursuer of his lust,” even to the extent that he drank sweet wine “in which snakes weer dissolued, being commonlie called viper wine, to restore nature.” But at the end, God graciously “sent him a

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heauie affliction” that caused Cotton to achieve “a full sight of his former sinns, & was the happie occasion of his heartie & true repentance.”124 The “heauie affliction” that, in Simonds’s opinion, shortened his dear friend’s life was the loss of the use of his massive and famous library, the library upon which Simonds partly modeled his own. A few years before Cotton died, an Oxford scholar named Richard James, “a shorte reddbearded high coloured fellow. . . had soe scrued himselfe into the good opinion” of Cotton that he was allowed to borrow books from the library. The impecunious James was “an atheisticall profane scholar, but otherwise wittie and moderatelie learned,” and he had loaned Cotton’s “most pretious Manuscripts for monie,” the very works that Cotton lent freely to his friends. One of James’s loans was “a dangerous pamphlet” that contained a plan by which “the Kings of England might oppresse the liberties of ther subjects, & for euer enslaue them and ther posterities.” This piece passed through various hands in 1629 until it came to Cotton’s attention, and he directed his assistant to make a copy of it. This proved, Simonds claimed, that Cotton did not even know that it had originally been in his library and lent at a price by the devious Richard James. By some means, it came to the attention of the Privy Council, and in November 1629, an investigation revealed that Flood, Cotton’s assistant, following James’s practice, made additional copies that he sold. A law student named Oliver St. John found himself “committed close prisoner” in the Tower of London because he was suspected of writing it. Under interrogation, he declared that he had received it from “that wretched mercenarie fellow James, who by this meanes prooued the wicked instrument” of Cotton’s downfall. Cotton was arrested, his library was “locked upp from his vse,” and guards were assigned “to watch his house continuallie.” Simonds “went several times to visit & comfort him” in 1630, and Cotton told him that “they had broaken his heart” by denying him access to his library. Simonds asserted that Cotton’s “honour & esteeme” had been damaged by this disaster, “and his howse, that was formerlie frequented by great & honourable personages as well as by learned men of all sortes” sat “desolate & emptie.”125 As a consequence of this ordeal, poor Cotton “was so outworne . . . with anguish & griefe” that his “formerly ruddie & well couloured” face took on “a grimm blackish palenes, neare to the resemblance & hue of a dead visage.” When later reading de Thou’s volumes, Simonds saw accounts of other great scholars who had died of “greife after ther libraries had been pillaged & spoiled by the violence of warre” and he immediately thought of “the losse the commonwealth had in our judicious Cotton.” This led Simonds “often to pray that if by tyrannie or iniustice, my librarie should

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bee wrested from mee, I might account it but a creature comforte, and soe submitt to Gods will in it with patience & humilitie.” He also asserted that it was “certainlie affirmed” that the young assistant who made the copies was Cotton’s illegitimate son; this demonstrated “Gods admirable iustice, to cause the spurious issue of his fatall lust, to prooue the immediate instrument of his finall ruine.”126 In fact, Simonds did not have the whole story of Cotton’s final years. Kevin Sharpe argued that the arrests of Cotton, St. John, and others in November 1629 were “a purge, by the remnants of the Villiers faction, of the enemies of the deceased duke.” Cotton, however, had powerful friends who spoke up for him.127 He was soon released, and he regained some use of his library so long as he was accompanied by the clerk of the Privy Council. Yet he was still petitioning for its return at the time of his death. It is possible that the ordeal weakened him and brought on his demise. Simonds, who knew him well, certainly thought so. An additional unfortunate result of Cotton’s death was that the library became the property of his son Sir Thomas, a greedy man who was “altogether vnworthie to bee master of soe inestimable a librarie as his Father left.” He went to see Sir Thomas just weeks after his father’s death and found him speaking of his loss “smilinglie without the least expression of sorrow.” After that, Simonds’s efforts to borrow an “olde booke of Saxon charters” that Sir Thomas had promised to provide were evaded “with soe manie friuolous excuses or faigned subterfuges, as I forebore further troubling anie messengers.”128 preserving the library On June 22, 1631, Simonds completed his fourth will, a Latin document that was still in effect with minor changes when he completed his autobiography in 1638.129 He revised it slightly in 1639 and made an English translation. His statement of faith and provisions for various legacies will be discussed elsewhere. Here the focus will be on the extraordinary effort he put into the preservation of his library for use in future generations by men like himself. When he wrote it in 1639, his son Adrian—“my young son yet crying in the cradle”—was living, but he already had too much bitter experience of the death of children. Therefore Adrian or “any other of my sons hereafter to be born, who shall prove my heir” would receive “my precious library, which I have stored up for divers years past with great care, cost, and industry, divers originals and autographs, ancient coins of gold, silver and brass, manuscripts, or written books, and such as are imprinted.” But he charged his heirs to make sure that the library was not “locked up from furthering the public good, the advancing of which I have always endeavoured.” Rather, he desired that “all lovers of learning,

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of known virtue and integrity, might have access to it at seasonable times, so that they did give sufficient security to restore safely” the items they borrowed. He was well aware that God might have determined “an end to my family in the male line” and to subject it to an eclipse comparable to that suffered by his great-grandfather Adrian in the loss of his position and estates in Gelderland. If so, Simonds bequeathed his “library, or paper treasury” to his eldest daughter conditionally. The condition was that she (if unmarried) or she and her husband would “enter into a bond of a thousand pounds penalty” payable to her mother, Anne D’Ewes, “if she be then living, or to my other daughters or their husbands” after Anne died. The requirement of the bond was that the heirs not “sell away or dissipate any part of my said library.” Failure to perform the condition would then mean that the library would go to his “next daughter upon like security, and so from daughter to daughter, till it shall come to my brother Richard, if all my daughters shall either refuse to put in caution, or shall break the condition.”130 It must be emphasized that the library provisions in Simonds’s will had two purposes. He wanted to do everything he could, not only to make sure that his library survived and remained intact but also that it remained open to others without charge. He did not want it to undergo the declension that Sir Thomas Cotton had wrought upon the magnificent Cottonian collection. This was not simply a matter of a vain pride in the success of Simonds’s collecting activities, although they were indeed impressive. The openness was also about the pursuit of truth in the public interest and prevention of the diversion of libraries such as his and Cotton’s into the service of personal gain rather than the advantage of the Commonwealth of England. In the will, after writing the stipulations laid out above, he then reiterated his insistence that everything in his library, including papers involving his family, Anne’s family, “or any other families from whom we are descended” be accessible both to “all lovers of learning” and to “my other daughters or their husbands . . . that they may transcribe what they please.” The reason for this policy was that, although he had “stored up many particulars” of his family’s history, he had abhorred any “fucacy” or “lying inventions” that misrepresented the verifiable documentary record in order to heighten claims about or connections to a distinguished ancestry. “Fucacy” does not appear in the O.E.D., but “fucate” is defined as “artificially coloured, beautified with paint; hence, falsified, disguised, counterfeit.” In his will, as elsewhere, Simonds insisted that the many hours he had “searched amongst the king’s records or public offices” were in pursuit of “the very truth.”131 Even in his will, he continued to assert that his genealogical investigations sought accuracy

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and eschewed the deceitful practices employed by many to prune base branches from their family trees. Some might suspect that he protested too much and was indeed guilty of precisely the subterfuges he condemned. But as the discussion of his research about his forebears in Gelderland in Chapter 2 argued, it is quite possible that he was entirely sincere. Would a man who had colored or even falsified the record to his own advantage go to so much trouble to make sure that the relevant documents remained available to all interested researchers? It seems unlikely. He could still have been mistaken about the validity of his findings, but he remained utterly committed to the principle that nothing should be taken as truth without solid and datable documentary evidence. He was, after all, quite serious about writing a history of England from the earliest times until his own, and he thought of that history in large measure as a history of families—royal families, of course, but also the families of substantial noble and gentle landowners. In his way of thinking and that of other members of his class, the only institutions (besides the church) that persisted over long historical spans of time were families. There were as yet no national banks and only a few (still quite novel) joint-stock companies. The Bank of England was not chartered until 1694. Even nation-states were still in their larval stage. D’Ewes’s world was one of dynasties, not commercial corporations or nations, and his preoccupation with siring a male heir so that his family would retain its name and distinctiveness over time was not unusual. It was, among landowners, a universal preoccupation. To marry heiresses, as he and his father had done, was to gain control over acres, resources, and prestige that other men had struggled to build—often over many generations. This concern drove Henry VIII to break with the pope in 1533, lest England fall under Habsburg control. To leave only daughters was to surrender those gains to other men’s families. Simonds certainly had his eccentricities, but we need to remember that many of his preoccupations were altogether characteristic of his time and social place. Indeed, they would have been perfectly understood and accepted by yeoman farmers and others further down the social ladder who were working to the same ends on their rungs of that ladder. Simonds was working to regain in Eng­ land a rank achieved, he believed, by his forebears in Gelderland, but he insisted on doing it honestly. For one thing, this meant the eschewing of usury, and for another it meant no deceptive manipulation of claims to elite status. He would do it uprightly, or not at all. And he would leave to the inspection of subsequent generations the documents that he thought proved his case. Simonds’s continuing zeal to discover more about his own ances-

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try as well as those of his wife and brothers-in-law expressed itself less than three weeks after his father’s death in 1631. On April 4, he went to see his father’s widowed sister, Alice Lathum, who was lying ill in Ironmonger Lane, London. This was the “Aunt Lathum” whom he and his father had frequently visited in Upminster, Essex, on their way back and forth between the Six Clerks’ Office and Stow Hall when her husband had been living. She was nearly seventy, and Simonds had borrowed from the widow of his father’s cousin, Peter D’Ewes, a likeness of Alice Ravenscroft, the wife of his great-grandfather, Adrian D’Ewes. When he showed his aunt the picture, she “embraced it, & assured mee it was the true picture of her grandmother.” She had been about seventeen when Alice Ravenscroft died in 1579 at approximately eighty years of age. Having suspected that she would confirm the identity of the sitter, Simonds had brought with him a limner, “a verie able workeman,” who took the picture to his house and by that same evening had produced a copy of it. Simonds thought it “as good as the originall” so far as the “face and vpper parts of the bodie” were concerned. For his purposes, it was better because the original was “onlie a short half picture,” whereas his was full length and included the “empalement of her husbandes coat-armour & her owne on the right side” and an inscription on the left. Writing about this episode some six or seven years later, he stated that he still had the picture and treasured it “at as high a rate as I doe the exact & full picture at lengh of my father, drawen & taken the summer before hee died.” Three days later came “another discouerie” when he visited the church of St. Michael Bassishaw in London and found a record of Alice Ravenscroft’s burial on July 28, 1579. As we have noted, his pursuit of the Netherlandish branches of the D’Ewes family tree continued when his brother Richard was traveling abroad in the late 1630s.132 projects new and old On January 1, 1631, Simonds began a transcription of “a Manuscript Saxon dictionarie” that a friend who was a deputy-chamberlain in the Tally Office permitted him to borrow. Not long afterward, he heard that a Cambridge man named Lisle was on the verge of publishing a Saxon dictionary. Simonds concluded he would proceed with his intention to prepare his own only if Lisle’s did not in fact appear.133 As we shall see, it was something to which he would later return. In the same month, he continued his study of an abstract he had obtained of some of the Patent Rolls (the originals of which were in the Tower of London) alongside his transcribing of chronicles from Pipwell Abbey. In February, he took notes on an aged parchment manuscript of “the names & armes of all or the

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most of the nobilitie & knights” during Edward II’s reign and did more work on the Elizabethan parliaments and on Domesday. The progress with the Elizabethan parliamentary journals was well advanced although not yet finished, but Simonds nevertheless directed his assistant to begin working on the journals of the parliaments of Mary I.134 Work on the journals continued through the summer and into the autumn, but he also kept studying Domesday. He also borrowed from Sir Edward Peyton a batch of “the olde deedes of the Peytons” of Cambridgeshire. In them, he found further confirmation of the noble descent that he had already worked out for his wife. By October he had resettled his family in Islington, so it was easy for him to spend most of that month and the next several making frequent visits to the Exchequer’s Tally Office that held Domesday. Yet, as before, he grumbled about the loss of much of his “invaluable time” and income to the administration of his and his father’s estates. Although he insisted he had never sued anyone “vniustlie or for triuial matters,” he had experienced “manie pettie wrongs by my peaceable disposition; & haue lost great summes of monie” after lending them “freelie without taking a penie for vse.”135 Alongside Domesday and other continuing projects, in January 1632 Simonds worked more and “wel forwarded” a treatise he had begun earlier that he called the “Defence or Justification of the King of Swedens warre in Germanie.” Like so many of his other projects, it was never completed. He also began transcribing Saxon charters, and his method was to have his servant copy those that were in Latin while Simonds did his best with those “penned in the old English or Saxon tongue.” In February and March, he found himself looking at documents in the Pell Office of the Exchequer, a venue to which he frequently returned. He continued his note-taking on the Pipwell Abbey chronicle and later found other useful chronicles and a leiger book (register). As with the Tally and Pell offices and others, he “borrowed diuers original deeds there kept, transcribed them and had the seals tricked and coloured to them.” This means that he employed limners to embellish his copies of the texts with copies of the seals and coats of arms. One cannot browse through his papers without running across numerous products of his industry as a researcher and seeing these vividly colored images. As has been mentioned, some of the parliamentary clerks permitted him to borrow the journals that they kept. In the case of some of the Elizabethan journals, the transcripts he made supply our knowledge of records later lost. For modern scholars working with rare books and manuscripts that never leave the archives that house them, the prospect of “borrowing” these documents and taking them home for weeks or months of study is too delicious to imagine. He could

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also borrow deeds and other documents on parchment or paper from landowners he knew (such as Sir Edward Peyton, Sir Edmund Bacon, and numerous others), and many of these have been lost. Although there were some interruptions, such as the expulsion of gentlemen from London by Charles I in 1633, Simonds enjoyed this cornucopia for most of his adult life. We should be grateful that he made good use of it and, he maintained, “then faithfullie restored them againe” to their proper places.136 On March 16, 1632, Simonds left Stow Hall and reached Cambridge the next day. On March 19, King Charles I and his queen arrived from Newmarket at Trinity College, Cambridge, where they attended “an idle play ther that give offence to most of the hearers.” Simonds, meanwhile, spent his time in Trinity’s library examining “diuers ancient Manuscripts, which affoorded mee as much content; as the sight of the extreame vanitie of the Court did sorrow.” The royal couple left on March 20, and Simonds left the following day after a pleasant dinner “with some learned men ther.” He went on to Islington but recorded his disapproval that numerous Cambridge degrees had just been granted to “diuers new & unworthie Doctors of diuinitie.” At these awards, “the whole bodie of the vniversitie” was greatly angered, and he told Dr. Henry Butts, the vice-chancellor, “to his face” of their resentment that these degrees had been bought rather than earned. For his part, Butts nevertheless “carried the busines thorow with much disorder & violence” at the behest of the secretary of the chancellor, Henry Rich, earl of Holland. The resulting furore, according to one of Simonds’s Cambridge informants, was loud enough to lead the “the King himself whilest hee was at Cambridge” to administer rebuffs to Butts, who then hanged himself. “Assoon as I heard” of the vice-chancellor’s suicide, Simonds remembered “the ghastlie looke hee had when I went to visit him at his colledge” on March 21. He opined that Butts “had lying on his conscience that crying sinne of adulterie, which he secretlie practiced.” Otherwise, the “deuill himselfe could neuer have brought him” to commit suicide “vpon the meere froune of a Prince.”137 Simonds spent the rest of the spring for the most part in the records and law courts in London, although he made a foray into Norfolk in May to buy a large collection of coins from the heir of a collector named Harrison. He discovered to his surprise that Harrison’s collection had “diuers peices amongst them that weere certainlie false & adulterate.” Nevertheless, the Roman coins from Pompey to Honorius and Arcadius pleased him and helped him fill out his series of Roman emperors. These he then had placed in ivory roundels “together with some siluer Brittish Saxon and English coines” and stored in drawers “in a box made on purpose for them, in which they now stande in my librarie.” Although numismatic work kept him busy, he also con-

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tinued his forays to study Domesday and thirteenth-century “communia rolls” in the Exchequer. Furthermore, in July he bought another collection of “verie good Romane coines” from a goldsmith’s widow.138 Simonds’s most exciting discovery came on his way home from the Tally Office on August 3, 1632. He paid a visit to the York Herald, William Neve, in the Office of Arms on St. Peter’s Hill in the City of London. Neve showed him—and later gave him—“an originall deed of Richard Basset.” Basset had been chief justice of England under King Henry I early in the twelfth century. “I was taken with admiracion and content, at the sight & perusall” of the deed, Simonds wrote, because it was “the most ancient deede in Christendome to which a seal of armes hangeth.” He treasured it the more because his wife, Anne, was descended from “a female inheritrice of the same Richard,” as he had determined at the time of their marriage in 1626. As if this were not enough, the surviving seal was quite extraordinary and magnificent. He had seen many medieval seals, but this one was “exotick & rare” because it was attached to the top rather than the bottom of the document “in a strong labell of thicke white leather.” A lengthy description of every detail follows in Simonds’s autobiography. It featured a “man armed in a coat of male [mail], the beauer of his head­ peice­open,” and holding in his “right hand . . . a sword with which hee had stricken vpon the vpper iaw of a gryphon and cutt it almost thorough.” The griffin was “verie livelie portraied . . . holding a naked child in his mouth” who was saved from death by the armed knight. Simonds concluded that the knight represented “Richard Basset himselfe” and that it symbolized the way that all judges had the “dutie to deliuer the weake and innocent from the cruell iawes & talons of powerfull & tyrannous oppressors.” Basset’s “armoriall seale” was more than five centuries old and seventy years older than any Simonds had seen in all his years of trolling through old documents. He thought that it exceeded in age even the seals of the Montmorency family in France, who were “accounted by some the first gentlemen of France, and of Christendome it selfe.” He took great care to have copies drawn of the seal “by a most skilfull hand” and to have them “verie exactlie depicted and coloured” along with the text of the deed itself. It was, he thought, “the most precious monument in my librarie.”139 Back at the Exchequer early in September 1632, he was pleased to happen across in “one of the bundles of the Plea rolls” from King Henry III’s reign, proof that “Theobald de Belhus was the sonne of Richard de Belhus, which I neuer saw prooued anie wheere else.” This was important because back in 1626 he had found evidence that Anne “inherits the bloud & armes of this familie.”140 He completed his reading in the first volume

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of Domesday on December 12 and thereby what he called his “large collection” of data about Cambridgeshire and Essex, which he hoped to publish (but never did). This was on the eve of the D’Ewes family’s move to Bury St. Edmunds that had been precipitated by the royal command that gentleman leave London. Simonds complained that—despite considerable progress—even as late as 1637 he had been unable to finish his “collecting” of information for a survey of Suffolk similar to the one that his “kinde & aged freind” Sir Henry Spelman had written about Norfolk.141 As 1633 began, Simonds continued to work on his survey of Suffolk, and he was still employing at least two assistants because he recorded that “my seruants” had been set to transcribing items from Exchequer records and from the plea rolls and fines from Richard I’s reign. These documents “had been lent mee from seuerall handes, so as we were all harde at work to enrich & increase my precious librarie.” He also made trips to borrow sources, such as one on January 22 when he went to the Sir John Tracy in Norfolk to obtain the loan of “a booke in parchment in folio of diuers ancient depicted coat-armours.” It also contained what he called newly drawn coats of arms that concerned various Clopton marriages, and he quickly found what he considered erroneous information in some of these. Nevertheless, he concluded that “much good vse might bee made of it.”142 Sir John Tracy’s wife was Sir William Clopton’s widow and Anne’s stepmother, and there was a history of legal disputes with the D’Ewes family over property. But Simonds did his best to avoid letting such arguments get in the way of the tedious but to his mind essential process of perfecting his historical evidence. In April, he complained that he had to spend most of the month “vpon the accounts & affaires of my estate, which I had suffered to runn on, too long vndisposed & vnordered.” Nevertheless, in that month he borrowed a register of wills from the ecclesiastical court in Sudbury which led him to “moore rare & richlie furnisht Registers” from a similar source in Norwich that brought in still more “invaluable collections” concerning Norfolk, Suffolk, and a few other counties. He next turned to “a uerie ancient Leiger booke of the Abbey of Burie,” and in May he was studying the twelfth-century monk Ordericus Vitalis’s Ecclesiastical History.143 At the end of June 1633, it will be remembered, Simonds moved his family from Bury St. Edmunds back to Stow Hall, which they shared with Lady Denton until her departure in November. The first task he set himself was “sorting my bookes & papers in my studie,” but on July 9 he set out for Cambridge and then London, where he bought the Frenchman Jacques Auguste de Thou’s massive Historia sui temporis (1620). De Thou (1553–1617), a Catholic and a politique, was a historian, book collector, and

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adviser to two French monarchs, Henry III and Henry IV. Simonds had the 138 “books” that composed de Thou’s work bound into five volumes for his library, and when he found time to read it two years later, its impact upon him was powerful. “I am of opinion it is the rarest humane worke the Christian world now enioies, being replenished with invaluable truth, and penned in a most loftie and elegant style. I have read it all ouer with admiracion & delight.”144 In 1639–40, he would, as indicated above, put his brother Richard to considerable trouble during his travels in France to obtain a likeness of de Thou for his library and to make sure that he had his hands on everything his beloved “Thuanus” had written. We will consider his insights and borrowings from the Frenchman in the next chapter. On July 12, he took off on one of his data gathering jaunts in the countryside, this time in Essex. His first stop was at Much Bromley, the home of his sister Mary and her husband, Thomas Bowes, and the next day he spent at Great Stanway church near Colchester, where he found gravestones of members of the Belhous family. Since he knew that Sir John de Belhous had married Isolda Fitzwarren of Rayleigh, Essex during Edward I’s reign, he rode to Rayleigh’s church and found Isolda’s will (dated 1353). He and Anne would later name one of their daughters Isolda. A stop at Reydon Hall in Ramsey on July 29 was fruitless, but a visit the next day to Sir John Lucas in Colchester yielded a loan of a manuscript from Henry I’s time that contained “manie vsefull particulars.” Upon returning to Stow Hall on August 1, he returned to the documents from the reigns of Henry III and Edward I and continued his study of them through September as well. He made only one excursion, this time into Norfolk and the home of his wife’s relation Thomas Knyvett at Ashwell Thorpe. There he discovered and borrowed “manie rare deedes of Basset of Welledone in Northamptonshire, with braue seales hanging to most of them.” He planned to combine his findings about all Anne’s forebears “into a large & Historicall Deduction.”145 Although the first half of October 1633 required him to devote much of his time to the complicated process of ending his administration of his brother’s estate, at least the work had to be done in London. This meant that he could frequently return to his old haunts in the holdings of various royal offices for more on the Belhous and Basset families and historical data from the reigns of King John and Henry III. He returned to Stow Hall on October 26, but he must have borrowed some rolls of Henry III because he “spent a great parte of this Nouember in collecting notes” from them, a pursuit he continued through much of December. His “allie and neighbour,” Sir Edmund Bacon, was by this time serving as sheriff of Suffolk, and Simonds visited him frequently in December and stud-

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ied various “Manuscript Chartularies or Leiger Bookes” that Bacon “verie louinglie lent mee.” He also borrowed Bacon’s copy of the chronicle written in Latin by the twelfth-century monk William of Newburgh, and Simonds reported that his “vsuall course” when traveling by himself in his coach was to read such works. When accompanied, “manie times also I read english bookes to others.”146 He continued to study various monastic registers in January and February 1634, along with more rolls from Henry III’s long reign. Much of February, however, was devoted to sorting out a number of originall deedes I had bought & gathered together, into a large presse I had caused to bee made of purpose for them, with seuerall drawers. Most of them I disposed alphabeticallie, marking the Drawers with great redd letters . . . . Into these drawers I put the seuerall deedes which principallie concerned sirnames beginning with that letter, or had ther seales of armes hanging to them. Manie originall deedes alsoe, Cyrographs, & other Autographs I put into other drawers, . . . This presse, replenished with manie rare originalls, now standeth in my Librarie, which is yearelie encreased & enriched, by diuers newe additions, soe as I alreadie value it at a uerie high rate.147

Simonds spent much of April 1634 on the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth years of the rolls of Henry III, but the aftermath of Damport’s caustic April 13 sermon caused much loss of time in his library because Simonds, as indicated above, tried unsuccessfully to persuade Bishop Corbet to rein Damport in. A visit to London early in May on business with Anne’s uncle Sir William Clopton permitted him to spend some days in “the Lord Treasurours Remembrancers office” at Westminster continuing his study of Henry III’s reign. He returned on May 16 to Stow Hall, where he found himself “much comforted with the heartie welcomes of my deare wife.” He devoted the rest of the month to a cartulary from Huntingdonshire’s Ramsey Abbey that Sir Henry Spelman had lent him, among other familiar projects.148 On July 21, 1634, he wrote a long letter to Sir Henry, who was then at the Barbican in London. He said that he had “much longed for your welcome lines before they came, hoping from them, (as even beyond expectation I found) to haue my Country life a little quickened by some learning of this nature.” Simonds’s response, nearly two thousand words long, is principally concerned with the patterns of office-holding in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the question of whether a great nobleman and high court justice like Ralph Basset could hold a shrievalty at the same time as he held judicial office. Spelman must have doubted it, but Simonds asserted that he could produce numerous precedents from the communia rolls he had examined.149 In the ensuing months, Simonds’s work continued along these lines now familiar to us, and by November 7 he completed his note-taking on the plea rolls of 1273

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(the final year of Henry III’s long reign). Later that month he again immersed himself in “the Descents of Chastelyn Belhous & Knyvet,” Anne’s ancestors. Having made peace for the moment with Damport, he recorded that he “enioied moore happiness in my priuate then I had done manie yeares before. . . . Yet the vast desolations of Gods Church abroad, & the generall hatred of Truth & Pietie at home; filled my soule with frequent sorrow & amazement.”150 This was neither the first nor the last time when Simonds treasured periods of domestic content while he confronted a threatening and dangerous wider world. During 1635, he sustained the same pattern of studies in medieval documents from the royal archives, wills from Bury, abbey registers, and other sources. These included in the autumn study of notes of Clopton arms in church windows at Talworth Wratting church near Kediton and Poley family documents at Boxted Hall.151 The principal source so far for our knowledge of Simonds’s “precious studies” is his autobiography, so its end in May 1636 requires us to rely instead on his correspondence. As demonstrated above, he continued throughout the late 1630s to give his brother Richard various chores searching for additions to his library while abroad. The correspondence yields a sketchier picture, but it is evident that he continued with the researches he had been pursuing for many years. Simonds wrote, for example, to Sir Edward Dering on April 22, 1637, to answer the Kentishman’s request for information from the reigns of Stephen and Henry II in the twelfth century. Simonds responded with substantial excerpts copied out by his assistant that provided “a prettie extract both chronologicall & topographicall, which concernes Douer Castle & Earle Hubert in part & I haue after annexed some of my owne obseruations of that Earle.”152 A December 8/18, 1636, letter from Sir William Boswell, the English agent at The Hague, demonstrates that his interest in his family’s origins in Gelderland had not flagged. Boswell related that he had consulted a member of the States General who came from “an ancient & noble Familie in Gelderland” and received a promise that this person would “produce some thing to the purpose” in due course about Simonds’s forebears. Boswell also knew about Simonds’s numismatic collecting because he went on to provide information about a “Medall (of two Urna floating vpon waues)” that Simonds was hoping to find and perhaps add to his collection.153 Boswell was aware of Simonds’s burgeoning preoccupation with the Anglo-Saxon language. At least as early as 1631, he had been examining Saxon charters and considering the compilation of a dictionary. But by late in the 1630s, he was returning to this idea with renewed energy. Boswell suggested that Simonds’s understanding of Anglo-Saxon would benefit

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from “this present Low-Dutch language,” and he promised to send “a Transcript of the Saxon Vocabularie you had once of mee.” Boswell acknowledged that, since it was drawn “only out of the 4 Euangelists,” it fell “farr short of a Dictionarie” of the kind that Archbishop Parker’s secretary John Joscelyn (1529–1603) had made or that compiled by William L’Isle of Ely (ca. 1579–1637), a man he thought Simonds knew “to be extraordinarily skilfull in that language.”154 As will be seen in the next chapter, Simonds’s own dictionary project took more and more of his time, especially in 1639 and 1640. The dictionary did not mean that he set aside his customary historical and antiquarian inquiries. On March 26, 1638, for example, he sent his brother a lengthy letter in Latin for delivery to André Duchesne in Paris. In it, he began by mentioning that he had for eighteen years been working on “an exact history of Great Britain” based on archival records because he found “everywhere scattered so many things of value among the ancients and so many errors among the moderns.” He praised the French scholar’s “huge edition of Norman writers” for the bright light it threw upon English history, but he also asserted that those writers could not be trusted in everything because they had their own “blemishes and hallucinations.” Orderic Vitalis, for example, had misreported the number of the sons of Count Hugo de Abrincis of Chester, and he had utterly failed to record important information about Ralph Basset and other members of that eminent Anglo-Norman noble family that deserved space in the next edition of Duchesne’s work. Indeed, Simonds continued, “you would particularly make me obliged to you” if Duchesne published a revised edition that would correct such errors, because “no faith is to be put in Orderic in this blind and bitter contest, for he vilifies and insults the Basset stock as being vile and recent.” The monk Orderic’s bias, Simonds asserted, came from the fact that as Henry I’s judges the Bassets had “guarded closely and faithfully the royal rights of Henry the First” and thereby made “the entire monastic order” their enemies. Simonds’s very Protestant hostility to monasticism doubtless must be remembered here. He then went further and claimed that this was why Orderic, “otherwise the most learned in that century, hid the fact that Geva de Abrincis” who became Count Hugo’s heir married Galfrid Riddel and that their marriage produced as a sole heir the woman who married Richard Basset, the forebear of Anne Clopton D’Ewes.155 Whether the accompanying “stem” (genealogical chart) festooned with documentary citations proved all this to Duchesne’s satisfaction is unknown, but we can be confident that we have found the source of the name of Simonds and Anne’s fourth daughter, Geva, born in the summer of 1638. Fourteen months later, having received no reply from

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the Frenchman, Simonds wrote again. Perhaps, he thought, his earlier letter had been lost, and he then proceeded to impart new information from his recent work in the archives in London that bore on the Basset family history and on the offspring of various Norman knights who had invaded England in 1066. In a postscript, he urged Duchesne to devote himself to “publishing the life, history & literary remains of the incomparable man, J. A. de Thou.”156 the last sabbatical On January 21/31, 1639, Simonds informed Joachimi that he and his wife planned to spend “four whole months” in London, during which he intended to “be restored” by the many conversations he would have with his friend and also by the opportunity to peruse “the ancient worn-away parchments in the royal archives. Let us lament together there concerning the public miseries of the Christian world and the growing mass of huge sins and heresies.”157 Accompanied by their eldest child, eight-yearold Anne, the D’Eweses were at their “lodgings in Aldersgate with Mr Johnson a Taylor at the hand in hand” early in February.158 Their stay in fact lasted more than five months, for they did not return to Stow Hall until late in July, and just after their return Simonds reported to Joachimi that he had not been away from his beloved documents for more than “an hour in a day.”159 If so, he must have produced his letters to Thomas Downes, his steward at Stow Hall, at Johnson’s house at night. Simonds issued a stream of directions for the felling of trees, the sale of livestock and produce, the collection of rents, the distribution of money to ailing tenants and the poor of the town, the assistance of Lady Denton and Lady Stuteville at Ixworth, the monitoring of the D’Ewes daughters who were still in the care of wetnurses, and the continuing struggle to maintain concord with the splenetic rector at Stowlangtoft, Richard Damport. When Goodman Mullie was laid low by an ague, Downes was told to give him two shillings a week until he recovered.160 The steward reported that he had visited nurse Page and found the children “all in good health god be praysed.” But Geva’s “stockings ar growne too lettil for her.”161 Downes’s April 1 letter included a summary of his conversation with the new Mrs. Damport. She had told him that her husband had “been at Burie allmost this fortnight takeing fisick” but that she was hoping to “make bold to see your house & garden” on her own.162 Simonds responded to Downes with careful instructions that showed he had confidence in his man’s discretion. Damport had at times in the past made handsome promises and “then I know not vpon what false & friuolous tales altered. If yow find him constant to these rendered Christian promises of peace & loue then

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deliuer him this latine Letter enclosed, else not.” Downes was instructed to talk to Goodman Will Lines’s wife and “entreate her from mee never again to speak ill” of the rector “to anie person liuing.” Similarly Thomas Ong must be told “from mee to follow my example & to forgett anie hott wordes” that he had exchanged with Damport. This was because Anne “would bee much troubled to lose” Mrs. Damport, and it would be most unfortunate “if shee goe from the towne.” Moreover, since “the first pease are ripe send or carrie a masse of them to Ixworth & another” to Mrs. Damport because “my wife and I doe account our selues much obliged to her for her loue.”163 Although Simonds occasionally found fault with Downes’s efforts, he also looked out for his steward’s welfare. His March 7 letter expressed his anxiety about “the sadd newes of the presse” (that is, conscription of men for the king’s army) in Suffolk. He hoped Thomas would be “in noe danger” but if he felt threatened both he and his brother should “shutt vpp all the doores & keepe within the house & garden till the storme bee ouer” and the constables gone away.164 As their return in July approached, Downes’s tasks expanded to include the preparation of Stow Hall itself. Simonds told him to have the “bedd in the low roome . . . bee mooued vpp into the Nurserie” and to tell John Glover to brew “3 hoggsheads of new beere” that could “bee mingled wth the other beere if it prooue too stale.”165 His conclusion to his May 10 letter was Anne’s reminder about “the moths in the dining roome & elsewheere. Goodwife Hoskins & yow & Glouer must chase them once a day.”166 On June 20, he told Downes that they hoped to reach Stow Hall on July 4 or 5 and asked him to “entreate my Ladie Stuteville to preserue the cherries gooseberries & rasberies the last into marmalate for my wife.”167 In an undated letter to Downes, Simonds began: “Thomas Downes I haue scarce time in the day to eate, & now it is late at night that I write.”168 When we consider the sheer number of sheets of paper that Simonds covered with words, he must have had many days like this one. But there must also have been many days during Downes’s long service at Stow Hall that were as busy as his master’s. Late in September, Simonds wrote two Latin letters in which he reflected on his researches and collections to friends who shared many of his passions. He was already planning another foray to London soon after Christmas and had no way of knowing that by then he would be the sheriff of Suffolk and thus could not leave the county. Nor could he have known that his shrievalty would be followed closely by his election to the Long Parliament and that his public duties would swallow up nearly all his time thereafter. In other words, this five-month interlude in 1639 proved the last he managed to enjoy. In the first letter, written on Sep-

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tember 24, he asked the earl of Bath to lend him documents concerning several families in his pedigree so he could analyze them. He claimed that he had found many mistakes in the lineages of “illustrious stock amongst us” and had “restored the truth” to its real luster. Moreover, he asserted, “the public histories of this kingdom are for the most part of bad faith,” and “neither the errors of Camden, . . . nor those of Selden” and others had escaped his scrutiny.169 The other letter was written four days later to a man he venerated. James Ussher, the archbishop of Armagh, was a leading Calvinist theologian and historian of the early British church. At Stow Hall, Simonds had received a visit from Ussher’s daughter and Lady Barrington, from whom he had learned that the prelate had published a new study of church antiquities. He was delighted by this but saddened that he had not known that it was nearly complete because he thought he could have offered helpful assistance. During the preceeding thirteen years, he had “worked on a true history of Great Britain, for the most part to be vindicated from the archives themselves.” He had, moreover, “founded a library which, unless I am wrong, is the richest among the private libraries of England, after that of Cotton,” for whom he still grieved. He recognized the difficulty of the challenge he had taken up, but it needed doing because “scarcely one page of Camden’s much clarioned Britannia is free of its errors.” In particular, he had closely studied the religious history of the early Britons and was writing “a brief history” of the Pelagian heresy, which he believed was “alive again, among the Papists, . . . those execrable Anabaptists (designated by the new and accursed name of the very vain Arminius) and in the Pseudo-Lutherans.”170 We will return to this matter in the next chapter because it is central to the stance that he would adopt in the Long Parliament. Its value here is the way it demonstrates the linkages between what might otherwise seem disparate activities that Simonds pursued so energetically. The library he built up might have been an end in itself for some, and he was undoubtedly bitten by the bug that motivates avid collectors. But underlying this was his passion for applying what he learned to the great debates about Christian doctrine and the English constitution in the early Stuart period.

chapter

“The highest stepp of wickednes”—1631–1639

5

If the plethora of parliaments in the 1620s occupied the foreground in Simonds’s newsmongering, the complete absence of parliaments in the 1630s did not mean that his thirst for domestic and foreign news or his practice of keeping his friends informed of it diminished in the slightest. As before, he frequently inserted his own commentary along with the information itself, thereby interpreting everything in terms of his religious and political objectives. He continued to follow the fortunes of the Dutch, who were fighting the Spaniards for their independence, the struggles of the exiled Queen of Bohemia and her children, the condition of the Huguenots in France and the policies of Louis XIII and Richelieu, and the opponents (by now especially the Swedes) of the armies of the Holy Roman Emperor. As before, the religious and political events remained deeply intertwined, and the advance of what Simonds called “impious bishops” and their allies in England heightened his concern that he might face religious persecution sooner rather than later. Then, in 1636, what he thought of as the long arm of Pelagius reached Stowlangtoft itself and forced him to re-examine his priorities and his future course of action (which included the possibility of moving to New England).

The Newshound in Suffolk Simonds’s range of sources of news continued to be varied during Charles I’s Personal Rule. As indicated in the preceding chapter, his brother Richard became a regular supplier of intelligence during his travels abroad between 1636 and 1640. Two of his brothers-in-law, Sir William Ellyott and Sir William Poley, occasionally provided information. Ellyott, for example, wrote from London on Ascension Day (May 30) in 1633 to Simonds to report that King Charles was approaching Scotland, having left York on the preceding Tuesday, and that the king was sending the Order of the Garter to the young Elector Palatine, who it “is supposed will

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shortlye be if not alreadye restored.”1 When the king went north again in 1639, this time to try to suppress the rebellion in Scotland, Poley, who as a “gentleman extraordinary” of Charles’s privy chamber was summoned to join him, wrote several times to Simonds about his experiences during the journey. On April 29, he related that the king was to leave Durham that day on route to Berwick, but “what we shall doe there and next we ar all here Ignorant. God send vs a happy conclusion of this.”2 Simonds also received various newsletters. On January 18, 1633, one William Watts in London sent him news that he had received “by the Post that came on Munday last.” According to Watts, earlier letters from Berlin, Hamburg, and Leipzig that had reported the death of the Emperor Ferdinand were erroneous and that Gustavus Adolphus’s will stated that his armies would be led by Jacob Pont de La Gard.3 (In fact, Ferdinand lived for another four years.) A long and detailed, but unsigned, newsletter had information under such headings as “ffranckfort 2 May . . . Paris 10 May . . .” The writer said that Augsburg was in “a wofull condicon not onely” due to the “incredible extremityes” that had afflicted them “but alsoe in respect of the greate famine of the word of God which is like to last longer amongst them then the famine of bread, they being bereaued of all their Churches.”4 Georg Weckherlin at Whitehall, an expert on developments on the Continent, became a valuable new source about the Swedish advances in the Holy Roman Empire shortly before the death of the Emperor Ferdinand II in February 1637. He sent an extract of German news along with a letter on February 9 in which he referred to his meeting with Simonds at Newmarket the previous year during the visit of the young Elector Charles Lewis (to be discussed below).5 Weckherlin exemplifies the convergence of several of Simonds’s concerns. They obviously shared a commitment to the Palatine cause, but another letter from the German demonstrates that Simonds had used his antiquarian talents to show that some of Weckherlin’s ancestors had settled in England in times past. On May 24, 1637, Weckherlin wrote expressing his gratitude for Simonds’s proof that “some greater ones, then I am, haue beene here before me of my very name and family.” By way of thanks, he provided “some good newes to impart vnto you” in return. The French had retaken two islands near Marseilles that the Spaniards seized and long held, and “the Swedes vnder Bannier” triumphed in Saxony. In addition, Charles I had given permission for the recruiting of soldiers under several English colonels for service in the Palatine cause.6 Yet another source of news of distant events was Edward Tynes, a London merchant trading in the East Indies. His January 13, 1637, letter to Si-

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monds provided vivid details about commerce with that part of the world and in particular about a voyage in which some of Anne’s money was invested. The Discovery had arrived with a valuable cargo at Plymouth, but Tynes had learned that “a couple of English pyratts” had attacked “two Junks in the redd sea.” In the ensuing battle, the crew of one of the junks, “the Mamodee of Diu,” captured and tortured “the Master merchants . . . & others of quallity” by attaching “burning Matches . . . to their fingers ends” in order to make them “confesse where their treasure lay.” Tynes promised that there would “be no dilligence wanting on my part” to make sure that Anne would “haue her diuidend.”7 Even more exotic was information he related to Joachimi in April 1638 from “an English theologian staying at Smyrna.” There had been “a huge earthquake” there the year before during which for “many days successively . . . the very houses seemed to dance like ships on the sea.” Then in September, an ambassador arrived in Byzantium from the Persian emperor “with a numerous and splendid company” and valuable gifts. But the embassy came to nothing when quarrels broke out, and the Ottoman sultan ordered the arrest of the Persians. Their noses were “cut off and their ears truncated, their throats were torn out by a noose before the doors of the ambassador himself.” Clearly, war between Turkey and Persia was imminent.8 the protestant cause Early in August 1631 Joachimi wrote from his residence in Chelsea with unwelcome news about the advances of the anti-Calvinist Remonstrants in his homeland and also to report that in France the Huguenots— whom he characterized as “those who are of purer religion”—were living “peacefully enough” under Louis XIII.9 Simonds in response said that “it is sad how much those evill grasses grow everywhere”—meaning “the Anabaptist heresies . . . recalled from the abyss by Arminius.” He had in mind the preceding senate of the university at Cambridge where “that wound, lethal to the truth, was thrust in.”10 In mid-September, Simonds wrote to Joachimi to thank him for information about the latest advances of the Swedish army against the Imperialists, those “Baalitic worshippers of Antichrist.” He argued that “it would be just” if Gustavus Adolphus, “the decoration and delight of princes . . . should rule the very universe.”11 On December 26, 1631, Simonds recorded that he had begun writing “an Apologeticall iustification” of Gustavus’s “incomparable & victorious” campaign in Germany. Simonds’s plan was to begin, as was his wont, with the Swede’s “Descent & Extraction” and then to justify his invasion of the Empire. Although the essay was “well forwarded” in January 1632, he admitted that he “neuer perfected it.”12 On January 5/15, he wrote urgently

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to Joachimi to express his pleasure with the published news that Gustavus, “the miracle of the world, has occupied Oppenheim and Mainz,” but he wanted to know whether it was true that Tilly’s army had been completely destroyed, whether the Elector Palatine was indeed traveling to Germany, and whether Gustavus wanted the Elector “reinstated in his Bohemian kingdom?”13 This was after the important Swedish victory over Tilly at Breitenfeld in September 1631. Gustavus’s advance continued for more than a year, and then he died at the battle of Lützen in November 1632. On November 29, Simonds wrote sadly to his Dutch friend: “The object of the love of God and men, the flower of heroes, has perished from the earth . . . the greatest King of Sweden and most fierce revenger of the church.” He noted that several of the Imperial generals were slain in the battle and their forces routed. Gustavus, “having fought with ardour and fulfilling all the duties of a high prince,” had gone “to the heavens to triumph, about three hours before the victory was entirely gained.”14 Sir Martin Stuteville was one of Simonds’s friends who admired the Protestant hero from Sweden as he did. Another was Sir Edward Peyton, who wrote a Latin letter from his seat at Isleham in Cambridgeshire to Simonds in Bury St. Edmunds. Peyton asserted that Gustavus’s “glory traversed the globe” and that “the unconquerable Swede, although dead, suffered in supplication for our sins.”15 In his autobiography, Simonds took a no less historic—if not quite so Christocentric—approach. “A meere politician & atheist,” he wrote, could claim that the Germans would have benefited if Gustavus Adolphus had never set foot on their soil. If so, then by 1638 peace would have been restored, “the grounds been tilled and Poperie fullie established.” Simonds, however, chose “to speake as a christian & much moore as a pious Protestant.” From his point of view, “all ages” should thank God that Gustavus’s campaigns “weere Gods iust scourge . . . to auenge him on the bloudie & lustfull souldiers of the Emperours armie; to abate ther pride, & to save England France the Lowcuntries and all from ruine.” Indeed, it was the presence of a powerful Swedish army that was “the chiefe meanes vnder heauen” that stymied the effort of the new emperor Ferdinand III to “vtterlie oppresse the gospell in the Empire” as his father had sought to do. Simonds had read that Gustavus had conceded to “a reuerend ancient Scotch minister” not long before his death that he might have begun to feel excessive pride because of his successes and that God might “either take him out of the worlde, or giue his enemies some notorious victorie ouer him.” Gustavus had always treated the Elector Palatine and King of Bohemia “with much curtesie & respect.” Soon after Gustavus’s death, the elector died because his “great & princelie heart” was broken by the loss of his friend. It destroyed his

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hope of regaining his homeland. Simonds concluded his remarks on the king of Sweden by asserting that “neuer did one persons death in Christendome bring soe much sorrow to all true Protestant hearts”; it was more devastating than the premature losses of Edward VI and “our late heroicke & inestimable” Prince Henry.16 Simonds arrived in London on May 9, 1634, on legal business for his wife and reported himself “much ensadded” when he was told that the next day William Prynne, a fellow lawyer, was to suffer mutilation in the pillory at the behest of the Court of Star Chamber. He described Prynne as “a most learned religious gentleman” who “had written manie acute solid & elaborate treatises” against the “blasphemous Anabaptists” and also “against the vices of the clergie, and the abuses of the times.” He was being punished for certain remarks in a book he had written against stage-plays that were interpreted as “words tending to the Queenes dishonour, because hee spake against the vnlawfulnes of mens wearing womens’ apparell, & women men’s.” Simonds opined that “most men weere affrighted . . . that neither his Academicall nor Barrister’s gowne could free him from the infamous losse of his eares.” Indeed, “all good men” expected a remission of the sentence, but it never came. He went to visit Prynne not long afterward to comfort him in the Fleet prison “and found in him the rare effects of an vpright heart and a good conscience, by his serenitie of spirit and chearefull patience.”17 Writing to Joachimi early in 1635, he asked whether it was true that—as some reports had it—William Noy, the king’s attorney general who had prosecuted Prynne, had on the very same day that Prynne was denounced in the Star Chamber relapsed into the same illness from which he died some months later.18 The next chapter will relate the story of how Simonds’s path crossed Prynne’s again in December 1640 when he served on a committee in the Long Parliament charged with compensating Prynne and others for their sufferings at the hands of Archbishop Laud in the 1630s. On August 27, 1634, the Protestant forces led by a German, Duke Bernhard of Weimar, and a Swede, Gustav Horn, suffered a massive defeat at the battle of Nördlingen. On November 10/20, Simonds begged Joachimi for solace about the consequences of this catastrophe for “true religion,” which was again “in danger.” He asked whether the Catholics were boasting that the late Gustavus Adolphus had “poured out his blood” for little gain. “Will all the trophies,” he asked, “created with such sweat and in so many battles, throughout a three-year period, in Germany, be destroyed by one loss?” He hoped that Joachimi’s letters “which have so many times given us new spirits” would do so again at this moment. He reiterated his fear that the Swedes might leave Germany and instead go to war with

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Poland, thereby leaving England and the Dutch Republic to face the resurgent Habsburgs.19 When he came to write his annual review of public affairs in 1634 late in December, he began it by mourning the horrific battle of Nordlingen and the subsequent loss of most of the duchy of Württemburg and even “the greatest parte of Germanie.” Since, he noted, the details were “extant in print,” he omitted his usual full description and moved on to two other matters: the continued advance of anti-Calvinist churchmen “in both vniversities & elsewheere” in England, and the departure of “soe manie godlie persons, . . . to go into New-England in America, at least 3000 miles from this kingdome by sea; there to plant, in respect of the doctrinall parte, one of the most absolutelie holie orthodox, & well-gouerned churches in Christendom.”20 We will address these topics more fully in the final section of this chapter, but we should notice that Simonds had shown an interest in New England even earlier. On August 14, 1630, Stuteville reported that he had learned from Mede that the journey of “our late transported planters into New England” had been so difficult that “many of them, both people and cattaile, perished . . . which if true, will much discorage the undertakers.”21 Nevertheless, in 1633 Simonds tried to invest in Massachusetts. A Suffolk man who had emigrated, William Hammond, wrote on September 26 to report on the £20 that Simonds had sent to buy “a cuppele of bullockes for to bred a stock.” Unfortunately, bulls “ar wondurfull dere here & there is non to be gotton but at a gret preise.” He claimed to be trying to locate an animal for “Sur Simmyones” despite the scarcity of the beasts. Hammond said that he had gone to Governor John Winthrop to tell him about Simonds’s investment and that the governor and other officials there were delighted that “youer worshipe is such a good willer to new england.” Much of the rest of the long letter consists of splendid tales of the plenty the settlers enjoyed and the progress of their colony. For example, just a few men could go fishing three leagues out to sea and catch three or four hundred codfish in one night. And “we have a fishe we call it a holyback some of them ar ney as big & a long as a man.”22 During 1635, the aftermath of Nördlingen had two impacts on Simonds. First came an increase in the volume of his correspondence with Joachimi as he struggled to gain greater understanding of the most likely outcome of the long struggle between the Protestants and the Habsburgs. He had written to the Dutchman once in 1632 and thrice in 1633 and 1634. In 1635 he wrote nine times, usually at considerable length. These letters contained the reports on the health of little Clopton, as we have seen, but they also addressed other subjects. Second, Nordlingen made him realize that he might have to leave Europe in order to practice what he considered the

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“true religion” and that Massachusetts might be his best option. That the grip of the anti-Calvinists appeared to be growing stronger even in England heightened his concern. When, for example, he went to Cambridge for the commencement exercises early in July, he was shocked to hear “a yong impudent scholler” named “Nouel” (Novell) who dared to argue during the disputation on July 6 in favor of “Justification by workes, & that the verie outward act of baptisme tooke away sinne.” What Simonds called “his brazenfaced asserting of these popish points . . . was abhorred by myselfe & all the orthodox hearers in the commencement howse.” Dr. Samuel Ward, the Lady Margaret professor of divinity and master of Sidney Sussex College, moderated the event and publicly and punningly “rebuked the same novellizing fellow for broaching those grosse heresies,” which were directly opposed not only to the Bible and the Thirty Nine Articles but also to the doctrines of both Lutheran and Calvinist theologians. Simonds related that when he and Ward supped that evening “we both lamented the times that this wicked Nouel durst so impudentlie & openlie maintaine the villest; & most feculent points of all Poperie.”23 Many of these letters to Joachimi began by burrowing deeply into the news from abroad about the various fronts of the war, and some provided updates to Joachimi about the progress of the New Englanders. For example, in his last 1634 missive, written on December 22/1 January, Simonds’s remarks on “the public” reiterated his sadness about “that mournful slaughter at Nördlingen,” and he worried that Duke Bernhard of Weimar was threatened by “the fortified camps of Caesar’s men at Würzburg.” He went on to express his doubt that the actions of the king of France were “good for the Christian world.” Louis XIII, he thought, ought to attack Ferdinand’s armies instead of seizing control of German cities and thereby expanding his own sphere of influence. Simonds desired that peace between Sweden and Poland would ensue and free the Swedes to continue their alliance with Bernhard and other German Protestant princes. He then said that if Joachimi had “nothing certain concerning our new American England” to let him know because “marvellous things” had been achieved by God there “for the good of his church and the protection of this kingdom.”24 By the time he wrote his next letter to Joachimi on January 20/30, 1635, his survey of the woes in Germany and the hopes for help from elsewhere can only be characterized as lugubrious. After a detailed survey of the bad news, he added that “a new series of sad matters must be expected daily.” He went further and stated that a miracle would be required to prevent “the Austrian tyranny” from again threatening the Baltic “within a two-year period, the whole of Germany having been crushed under his feet.” By their “arms and blood” the Swedes had saved

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both England and the United Provinces from the Habsburgs for years, but Simonds reminded his Dutch friend of “our conversations of the years 1628 and 1629” and asserted that “those miserable times” had come again. New England, however, offered hope because in the preceding five years, the colonists had “laid the foundations for an excellent Church and Republic.” He estimated that their numbers had grown to five thousand and that eight towns had been established. Of these eight, five had not only a market and a magistracy but also “two theologians, one a doctor and the other a pastor, who with the elders look after the church” in a manner similar to that in Joachimi’s homeland. He praised the port of Boston as “able to embrace a most ample fleet,” the large herds of animals, and “the rivers and seas abounding with fish.” All things essential to shipbuilding were available there. Moreover, “God is sincerely worshipped, vices and sins” duly punished, and “the infants themselves, with a remarkable natural ability in the matter of religion, . . . that they are even admitted to the Sunday dinner” (the Lord’s Supper) as early as age fourteen. Divine providence, he asserted, was displayed in the safe arrival of emigrating women who were pregnant, those nursing infants, and those “exhausted by old age” or “labouring with a cough or infirm in the lungs [who] came forth strong in health.”25 Simonds’s March 9/19, 1635, letter bemoaned more defeats in Germany and reports that Sweden and Poland appeared on the verge of war in Prussia “unless God opportunely avert it.” He denounced reports circulating that slandered the colonists in Massachusetts for nonconformity in religion. In fact, they were “guilty of the sole crime (if it is a crime)” of laboring “under a tender conscience.” Simonds rebuked those English bishops who sought to force everyone to conform. In his view, it was undeniable “that the conscience cannot be forced,” and he railed against the bishops for attempting “to drag others” to their opinion even though “discrepancy as regards ceremonies in no way impedes the unity of the faith.”26 This is the earliest moment in his writings in which he put forward this conviction, which would receive extended exposition in his treatise entitled The Primitive Practise for Preserving Truth (1645). Writing to Joachimi early in June, he expressed regret about the deteriorating situation of the Protestants in Germany and hopes for accord among the British, the French, and the Dutch so that they could go to the aid of the Germans. If, he mused, King Ladislas of Poland married the eldest daughter of the Queen of Bohemia, then the Protestant cause might benefit. Even so, nothing good could “be expected in Germany, as I fear, while the Lutherans retract no part of the error of the ubiquitous Pseudo-Lutheran and Anabaptist, and nothing from the revived blasphemies of Pelagius.” Happily, however,

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“some hundreds” had set sail for New England. Unfortunately, a terrible drought across southern England created fear that during the day “the fruit and barley may be spoiled by the blistering heat of the sun, and at night . . . not only the apples in the gardens but even the rye in the fields, due to the almost continuous frosts.”27 By the time he next wrote at the end of June, God had sent ample rains that “restored us all” because “the peas and barley . . . almost dead” had come back and “pastures . . . grow green, and fields, full of water, . . . dance with joy with new burdens.” He acknowledged, however, that the United Provinces were being threatened by a new Spanish army under Philip IV’s brother, the Cardinal-Infante Fernando. Simonds reminded his friend of critical moments in the history of the struggle of the United Provinces for independence from Spain. “The Kings of France and Spain” were, he wrote, “the most powerful monarchs of the Christian world, in whose hands,” or so it seemed to many, “the fortunes of the rest of the princes are placed.” The Dutch had been saved from defeat when Philip II’s hatred of Henry of Navarre and the Huguenots led him to order his general, the duke of Parma, to invade France instead of continuing the assault on Holland in 1590 and 1591. This had “provided your Maurice and the confederates” of the Dutch States-General to establish “the finest Republic,” and Simonds prayed that it would “not perish before the end of the universe.”28 Simonds’s August 3/13, 1635, letter to Joachimi gave much space to the plight of his son Clopton, but he did not ignore the public situation. He asserted that God should be praised because things in “the Christian world” were not going “so badly as the followers of the Beast prate.” He probably had in mind the French declaration of war against Spain in April, but he worried that Louis XIII and Richelieu would not follow through with action because of opposition to the high taxes that war would require. Simonds also conveyed his frustration that the English government was moving to stop the Dutch from “all fishing of herrings.” This meant that the Dutch, “who have stood as a breastwork against the common enemy of Great Britain for sixty continuous years, must be deprived of the greatest muscles of their wars.”29 It turned out, however, that the English king was more interested in extracting money from the Dutch herring fishermen for licenses to fish in waters claimed by England than prohibiting them altogether.30 Simonds wrote again on September 18/28 to commiserate about more bad news concerning the United Provinces. The Dutch had lost some fishing busses and two naval vessels to the Dunkirkers; moreover, a siege that Frederick Henry, the prince of Orange, had been conducting had been “repulsed with great slaughter.” Simonds then expatiated at length on various horrible atrocities committed in wartime and

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their punishment by God in the form of defeats for their perpetrators, a recent ghastly example having been the sack of Magdeburg by an Imperial army under Tilly. Evenhandedly, however, he also cited the warfare in the Balkans between Christian and Turkish armies. A bitter siege there in 1596 was followed by “the most atrocious savagery” in which the Christians butchered “even those who had fallen to their knees as suppliants.” Babies and “pregnant women were cruelly killed: the stomachs of not a few pregnant women were dissected, in a dreadful spectacle, so that the fetuses in the womb might be seen. I omit to narrate how great the lust which accompanied this savage carnage was.” Thereafter, the Turks triumphed over the forces of Archduke Maximilian and Sigismund Báthory (the prince of Transylvania), “20,000 of the Christians being lost.” These woeful events formed Simonds’s prelude to the summer of 1635, when French and Dutch troops brutally sacked the town of Tienen in Brabant and committed horrible crimes: “Never have more monstrous lusts been heard of, never has a more savage cruelty raged. God cannot but take revenge upon that which is so foul in the doing and what is so detestable in the hearing, amongst men.”31 When he wrote his annual summary for 1635, Simonds said that the sack of Tienen “soon gaue a checke & stoppe to all [the French] victories.” He recalled the Polish-Swedish peace that had been made in September as “the onlie good forraigne newes” of the year because it was “the onlie hope I had left vnder heauen that the Swedes might yet proue the meanes & instruments to restore againe the gospell in Germanie.”32 the queen of bohemia and the prince elector The bad news from the Continent continued during the ensuing months, and Simonds lamented to Joachimi on June 6/16, 1636, that a rumored war between England and France would end all hope for the restoration of the Palatinate to the young Elector Charles Lewis and increase the likelihood that the Dutch would be subjected to “the cruel yoke of the white Moor” (the king of Spain). He worried that God was preparing “all his own people for the cross, prison, the inquisition and fires” and exposing them to “the cruel hatred of the bishops addicted to the Roman pontifex.”33 Simonds offered this pessimistic prophecy concerning the fate of the Palatinate just three months after he met the eighteen-year-old prince elector in person on February 2, 1636, and later corresponded with his mother, Elizabeth of Bohemia. Having ridden the fifteen miles on “a wett & windie day” from Stow Hall to Newmarket, he was told that the prince was ill and not seeing visitors. But Anne’s uncle Walter Clopton was there and introduced the soggy and weary traveler to Robert Stone. Stone was

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one of Charles Lewis’s attendants during his trip to England and an aide to the widowed queen who had sent her son to England in the hope of winning more assistance from her brother Charles I. Stone, who had served in her household since 1629, would be knighted by Charles at her urging in June 1637. When she succeeded in persuading Frederick Henry of Orange to give him a commission in the Dutch army in 1640, she told Sir Thomas Roe that Stone was “a verie honnest man and lacks no witt.”34 In 1636, Stone took Simonds straight into Charles Lewis’s bedchamber, where he kissed the young man’s hand and heard him say that he “was obliged to mee that had come soe farre to see him.” Later, while Stone escorted him away, “wee fell into discourse about the greatnes of the Prince Palatines family, of his sadd and exiled condition, & of the meanes” that might yet lead to his restoration. As Simonds remembered it, Stone was quite taken with his analysis of these matters and urged him to return the next day to talk with the prince himself about them. He hastened back home to select some “ancient Romane coines . . . to bestow vpon the Prince.” Accompanied by Anne, Richard and his youngest sister, Elizabeth, he returned in his coach with his gift. Charles Lewis “was marvailouslie pleased” with the coins, “and then leauing the Earle of Essex with diuers other noblemen at the fire hee retired with mee to a window, where I gaue him such solid & faithfull aduice for the recouerie of his lost cuntrie and dominions; as hee highlie approued.” Remaining overnight nearby, he spoke again with the prince the next morning before both departed for Cambridge. While most of the visitors then went to see a Latin play at Trinity College, Simonds went to talk with academic friends because he objected to “womens apparell worne in it, by boyes and youths.” At the supper that evening with the prince’s party, Simonds “stood behind his chair” and spoke with him frequently. Although Simonds noticed that that “many great men in the English Court” began to pay attention to him because of the “extraordinarie favour and respect” the prince showed him, he believed that the favor was “because hee understood my originall to bee out of the Lower-Germanie, & that my ancient inheritance was possessed by the bloudie Spaniard.” In this respect, he and the German had something important in common.35 Neither the account of the meetings with Charles Lewis in Simonds’s autobiography nor his report on them to Joachimi says anything specific about the advice he offered to the prince or to his mother.36 Like many English Calvinists, he had been keeping a watchful eye on the progeny of the late Elector Frederick and his wife, Elizabeth, for two decades. All of them had been reared in the same thoroughgoing Calvinism that inspired John Pym, Simonds D’Ewes, and so many other men who would soon be mem-

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bers of the Long Parliament. Until the birth of Prince Charles in 1630, the Palatines were next in line to the throne of England. Childhood mortality rates were high, so there remained at least a possibility that the young elector might reach the throne. In any case, he and his formidable mother had good reason to cultivate supporters in England wherever they could be found. The interest they and their advisers expressed about Simonds’s information and suggestions seems perfectly genuine. On May 15, 1637, Richard wrote from London to his brother at Stow Hall to report that he had talked to Robert Stone, who had been sent to England on Queen Elizabeth’s business. Stone told Richard “how much the Queene was pleased in reading [Simonds’s] Letter, it being a great comfort vnto hir in hir afflicion (she tould him) to haue some trew freinds.” Stone added that his mistress would much appreciate more of Simonds’s thoughts.37 From The Hague on April 16/28, 1638, the queen herself wrote to Simonds to thank him for “both your letters and papers you sent me” and apologizing that “manie troublesome busineses” had delayed her response. She thanked him for “the affection you beare to me and mine” and signed herself “Your must assured frend Q Elizabeth.” She enclosed as a gift three letters, one in the hand of her late husband, one in that of her eldest son Henry Frederick, who had drowned in 1629, and one by her cousin, the duke of Brunswick. A note in Simonds’s hand on her letter says that he received it on May 27, 1638 (o.s.).38 Stone wrote to him around the same time to thank him for “your last Large and noble letter” and for his “great affection . . . to her Maiestie whom I serue, and to the care of her princelie children.” He reiterated that the queen had taken “much pleasuer with the reading thereof” because they addressed “diuers matters whereof she hath perfecte vnderstandinge: I can assure you, that as she thanketh you much for your affection, so she valueth your Judgment.” For his part, Stone declared that in Simonds he saw a man who was “not carryed with the stream of this world, which commonly runneth after fortune, and prosperitie; I perceiue that in your priuate retirednes, ye see more into the publike passages of the times, then we, that liue amongst them, for I haue lerned many things by your discourse, which before I knew not.”39 The absence of the letters and other writings Simonds sent to Stone and the queen is unfortunate, but we can gain considerable insight into their contents from notes he made when preparing to write to them. He labeled these notes as “most of the materialls of my Letter to Queene of Bohemia . . . 1638.” They consist of about twenty-two hundred words and begin with the observation that virtually “euerie yeare . . . from 1620” had brought “horror to Gods children.” In the late 1630s, he had “manie sadd thoughts” about Elizabeth’s situation and feared that things would get

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worse for her. There were “daylie iealousies & now differences between Charles I and the Dutch because of the disputes over fishing rights and the bitter legacy of the Amboyna “massacre,” in which English traders were arrested, tortured, and executed by the local Dutch governor in 1623 in the East Indies. In England, the losses suffered by merchants and fishermen made “the dutchman hated worse then [the] Spaniard.”40 The implication was that if Anglo-Dutch tensions increased, the Palatines’ refuge at The Hague might be at risk. Moreover, the Habsburg threat to Dutch and English Protestants would increase, a worry that cropped up often in Simonds’s letters to Joachimi. Even if, he continued, “a partiall & iealous peace” held, there were still many dangers in the offing. If the Swedes were “expulsed” or the French dealt a blow either by a military defeat or an assassination of Louis XIII, then “all the Austrian Power [would] lie on the Vnited parte of the Lowe cuntries to ther vtter ruine; yow cannot imagine Madame how many dismall feares I had” in 1629 when a powerful Habsburg army had seized Amersfoort and then threatened Utrecht. Fortunately, that danger was averted when Gustavus Adolphus entered the fray, and Louis XIII finally moved against the Imperialists. Simonds commented next on the early months of 1636, when there was much talk of a fleet that Charles I would provide so that his nephew Charles Lewis could lead in an attack on the Spanish in the Caribbean. Nothing had come of this, however, and Simonds thought it was just as well, because of the fierce resistance the Spanish would put up against it. To succeed in capturing Spanish territory there, the Prince Elector’s fleet would have needed a level of support that Charles I could not have provided. The tragic outcome would have been an ignominious failure for Charles Lewis.41 Simonds’s reflections then moved to his greatest concern about developments in England itself in relation to the Palatine cause. He wrote of those malicious men who were busy convincing Charles I “that all of the Heluetick or French confession such as the Palatinate was & all the trulie orthodox in England are . . . Caluinists & Puritanes.” Altars were replacing communion tables, and idolatrous liturgical innovations were being introduced. “I haue heere enclosed,” he continued, “Doctor Laurences sermon which to mee is as Thunder & lightning & may serue as a warning peice to all orthodox & godlie Protestants either to prepare for secession or suffring.”42 This was Thomas Laurence, an Oxford divine and royal chaplain whose election as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford was engineered by Archbishop Laud in 1638.43 Laurence preached this sermon before the king at Whitehall on February 7, 1637, and according to the title-page, it was published later that year “by the Kings special command.” His text was Exodus 3:5, and it directs worshipers entering

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the temple to “put off thy shoos from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standeth is holy ground.” Inside the temple, the tabernacle “that is holiest of all” could be entered only by the high priest, “Aaron himselfe, . . . and that not without lotions, and propitiatory vestments, and mysticall sprinklings, bloud in one hand to appease God, and a censer in the other.” If this intense sacerdotalism that smacked of popery was thunder to Simonds, the lightning came next with a passage that he would have read as a reassertion of the doctrine of transubstantiation. Laurence denounced those who claimed that in the Eucharist Christ’s body “is not there, because Christ says ’tis there; and St Paul says ’tis there; and the Church of England says ’tis there . . . [and] not only by way of representation, or commemoration.” The most important place in a church should be the altar, “for the Word which we preach is not operative, but through the merit of that sacrifice.”44 As will be demonstrated below, Simonds’s humiliation at the hands of another Laudian ceremonialist, Bishop Matthew Wren, had occurred in 1636. He would have been very much on the lookout for the appearance of sermons such as this one by Laurence as evidence for his argument that such divines were tightening their grip on the conscience of the king. At the center of Simonds’s advice to Queen Elizabeth lay the prospects for her son, including the matter of a marriage partner for him. Perhaps he had heard word that both Charles Lewis and his brother Rupert were said to have busied themselves at the English court “in luxury and idleness and ruining their reputation by erotic adventures of a decidedly questionable kind.”45 Marriage, Simonds asserted, was the “onlie way” for Charles Lewis to avoid the “bewitching & cauterizing sinne.” Adultery, “if hee once fall into it will for euer hinder the diuine blessing vpon his actions; how incomparable a Prince had H[enry] 4 of France been had not that vice blemished all his actions.” He thought that the queen should not “despaire of obteining the roiall inheritrice of Sweden,” meaning Gustavus Adolphus’s only child, Christina (who would be twelve years old in December 1638). He related that he had boldly urged the elector to seek her hand, perhaps during one of those conversations in Newmarket or Cambridge. After religion, “greatnes of bloud” stood above “all other worldlie respects.” The Palatine family “weere ancientlie Kings” and later “Emperors & Electors, ther Antiquity as free Princes is almost incredible,” and indeed superior to that of Queen Christina (whose great grandfather was a mere gentlemen whose family was “none of the ancientest”). Charles Lewis had told Simonds details about his quest for assistance in his struggle to regain his territories, but in the two years that had passed since they talked he knew that none of them had been realized.46

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What follows here in Simonds’s notes is an argument about what the Palatines must not do if they were to keep their hopes alive in the face of so much disappointment. He reminded Queen Elizabeth that she “had the blessednes to bee bredd vpp by a trulie religious gouerness in your yonger yeares & now for your eternall good to bee trained vpp in your maturer dayes in the schoole of affliction.” He therefore prayed that as she had taken care “for the godlie education of his highnes, soe hee will not bee drawen from the loue of the Truth for noe worldlie respect whatsoeuer.” If her brother Charles I failed to provide the help that had not so far been forthcoming (and by inference would not be so long as the king followed the advice of the anti-Calvinists who surrounded him), then she should “cast about for some thirde way by France or Sweden.” She and her son should also remember the unfortunate example of France’s Henry III, who had allowed himself to be drawn into the treacherous plotting of the hardline Catholic Guise faction, those “enemies of the Gospell.” The catastrophic result was that “his Regall power was therbie not onlie diminished but his verie safetie endangered.” In desperation, in 1577 he secretly sent a messenger late one night to Christophe de Thou, the president of the Parlement of Paris and a politique, to seek help. “Alas,” the president said, “the teares euen standing in his eyes yow come too late now to ask counsell” because the Guises “are now growen too strong to be reduced into order.”47 Simonds, who drew this story from the Historia of his hero Jacques-August de Thou (Christopher’s son), knew that his readers were fully aware that Henry III was assassinated in 1589 by a Dominican friar and that Henry IV died at the hand of another Catholic assassin in 1610. This must have prompted Simonds’s statement that “I account it little lesse then a miracle at the end of euerie moneth when I heare the King of France liues.”48 It was a staple of Protestant political theory that Catholics could never be trustworthy subjects because it was an article of doctrine with them that rulers could be not only resisted but even murdered if the pope declared them enemies of their faith. The concluding sections of Simonds’s arguments directed to the exiled queen at The Hague characterize what he believed was the strategy of the various enemies of the true Christian religion in Europe. It encapsulates the religio-political ideology that he had been constructing for much of his life, and it embodies the thinking that would guide his actions as the sheriff of Suffolk in 1639–40 and as a member of the Long Parliament from late 1640 until near the end of his life. It also presents a conviction about the political consequences that necessarily flowed from supporting this ideology and also from opposing it. From the core of his being he believed that the enemies of the truth “now flatter & crouch” as they plot

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and scheme to reach the moment “when all the truelie pious Protestants are ruined.” At that moment, and assuming that God did not intervene to stop them, they would “grow insolent & importunate if not worse.” They would dare to preach sermons like Thomas Laurence’s. They “would gett vpp such a masse of superstition & idolatrie in the Church of God” that Charles I’s “best & most loiall subjects & your Highnes onlie true & faithful votaries amongst the subjects of England shall bee vtterlie ruined in the High Commission . . . & other Prelates courts.” If, Simonds believed, the godly had managed to win the struggle for Charles’s mind and heart, then “the Gospell” would have “continued in the power & puritie of it,” and the Palatines would have received the resources from England that would have enabled them to have “soe considerable an armie in Germanie” that they could have fought alongside French and Swedish forces. Behind this lay his assumption that parliaments would have been called and would have been dominated by men who might have found means to open the king’s eyes to the peril he faced and persuade him to reverse his course and perform his duty toward the Palatine cause by supporting it with money and arms. The parliaments would have supplied the funds to support this policy. Charles could, in other words, avoid a mistake like the one that Henry III of France had made when he fell in with the Guiseled League.49 Sadly, however, King Charles had been inveigled into the wrong camp, and only time would tell whether he would see the light and escape from the trap into which he had been led. In the interim, the result was that the “Papists, [and] popishlie affected Anabaptists (commonlie called by a new & false name Arminians) profane & Atheisticall” were enemies to the Queen of Bohemia and her children. These people spoke of the Palatine cause “as baselie, & contemptiblie as of the States of the Lowcuntries, falsely involuing both the warre of the vpper & nether Germanie vnder the Title of Rebellion.” Indeed, the Jesuites had “dispersed manie virulent and bitter libels (of which I gaue the Prince Elector one) against your Maiesties cause & afflicted estate.” They scoffed at “the Puritanes,” by which they meant “those that liue honest & godlie lives & esteeme the forraign churches of the French and Helueticke confessions such as was maintained in the Palatinate to bee true churches.” Simonds urged Queen Elizabeth to remember that “God may turne all to good” and had done so repeatedly in recent times. For example, the stunning defeat of Christian IV of Denmark at Lutter in 1626 and the loss of the Huguenot stronghold at La Rochelle in 1628 had been followed by important setbacks for the Catholic juggernaut. Louis XIII’s eyes were opened by God, and he finally saw where the real danger lay. The consequence was that the Emperor

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Ferdinand suddenly had to pull back his armies, and Christian IV, who had appeared to be on the verge of destruction by Wallenstein, narrowly evaded ruin. Gustavus Adolphus also entered the fray powerfully, and without his contribution “the Emperour had ere this swallowed vpp” all his enemies.50 For Simonds, the underlying moral was evident. Those who held fast to the religious truths contained in Calvinist doctrines and opposed its enemies would win salvation to eternal life whether or not they enjoyed success in the temporal world. Moreover, they could always take comfort in the knowledge that their cause would ultimately prevail, although not necessarily during their lifetimes. The range of historical evidence that Simonds could deploy and the breadth of his knowledge of events, people, and trends in the Thirty Years’ War must have impressed the queen, the elector, Mr. Stone, and others as they planned their course of action in the dangerous maelstrom of confessional politics that characterized Christendom in the first half of the seventeenth century. Stone had put his finger on Simonds’s value when he wrote that in his “retirednes” from the public world, the Suffolk antiquary could “see more into the publike passages of the times, then we, that liue amongst them.” By no means all of Simonds’s pursuit of foreign news concerned the Thirty Years’ War, the growth of tensions between England and the Dutch Republic, or the Prince Elector and his family in the late 1630s. He paid attention to reports he received from his brother Richard in France. For example, consider Richard’s gossipy letter of March 8/18, 1638, in Paris. He confirmed that the French queen was indeed pregnant and that the prince of Condé had two sons and a daughter old enough for marriage. The younger boy, aged eight or ten, was being prepared for a clerical career, and Cardinal Richelieu had endowed the lad “with a great spirituall reuenew to the valew of tooe hundred thousand crownes per annum.” There was talk of a marriage of Richelieu’s niece to the count of Soissons, but the count was said to be opposed to it in part because “her descent [was] not from the ancient nobility” and also because of “hir honesty, . . . as all french men will not stick to tell yow vpon the least acquaintance: that she is Mistress to hir vncle.” No less titillating was Richard’s account of the king’s brother, Gaston, duke of Orléans. Known to all as “Monsieur,” this troublesome royal sibling was “an vbiquitarie thing having no certain recidence.” Richelieu, in order “to make him lighter in mens esteems,” made sure that he was always short of money; therefore in him “the french prouerbe is verified, Quan[d] argent faut, tout faut,” meaning, “where money is needed, everything is needed.” Richard said he had seen “Monsieur” in Paris two days earlier, “whear he made mirth for all the Companie.” Then there were Gaston’s debaucheries and his

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childless marriage with the sister of the duke of Lorraine. In her case, “by the Corruption of hir seruants (in all she eate) things were giuen hir to hinder Concepcion.”51 Giving credit to Richard, Simonds passed on much of what he called this “quite secret arcana” from France to Joachimi in his April 19/29 letter. In his version, Gaston “becomes worthless in the eyes of men of every type on account of sins and whores and lack of money.”52 ship money and the prayer book rebellion On the domestic front, two matters loomed large in 1637 and 1638. They were the result of two new policies imposed by King Charles I: the ship money levy in England and the use of the Book of Common Prayer in Scotland. Near the end of his autobiography, Simonds inserted a thunderous blast against the levy. After his summary of foreign news for 1635, he wrote a lengthy diatribe that began: “At home the libertie of the subjects of England receiued the most deadlie & fatall blow” it had suffered for five centuries. This was because writs were sent out the preceding summer to “all the sheriffs of England, to leuie great summes of monie” throughout England and Wales “vnder pretext & coleur to prouide shipps for the defence of the kingdome.” Although, he asserted, England was altogether at peace and “the roiall fleete was neuer stronger,” the government nevertheless demanded the payment of £320,000. If this proved lawful, the monarch could then “vpon the like pretence” collect “the same summe tenne twentie or an hundred times redoubled and soe to infinite proportions vpon any one shire, when & as oft as hee pleased: & soe noe man was in conclusion worth anie thing.”53 His elaborate argument against the legality of the ship money levy continues for nearly two thousand words and will be discussed more fully in the next chapter in the context of his term as sheriff of Suffolk. Interestingly, however, as Peter Salt pointed out, “even in his private correspondence with close friends such as Joachimi, ship money and its implications received no explicit mention at this stage.”54 There can be no doubt that Simonds knew about what the king was doing and about Sir John Hampden’s legal challenge to it. A lawyer of the Inner Temple, Richard Edwards, wrote to him on April 14, 1638, that “the newes of the moment now in Towne is that this day Judge Crooke,” a justice of the Court of the Exchequer, “argued possitiuely against the kinge & for the liberty of the subject in his Estate, the truth & the dischargeinge of his Conscience beinge his Apologie. And his Argument verie sound & honest.”55 In another letter just over a fortnight later, Edwards told Simonds that there was “noe other materiall newes” than that of “the vnanimous concurrence in Opinion of those 2 most graue Reuerend & Learned Judges Justice Crooke & Justice Hutton in the busi-

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ness of the Shippmoney.” “By report,” the spreading awareness of their stance had severely undermined efforts to collect the tax.56 Simonds’s silence, at least with regard to what he put in writing, was surely due to lawyerly caution and self-protection rather than any lack of certainty on his part about the illegality of the levy. With respect to religion in Scotland, Simonds’s attitude received some attention in the previous chapter concerning his remark in a 1629 letter to Joachimi in which he lauded John Knox as “the Scottish Calvin” and praised Knox’s powerful confutation of “all the erroneous dogmas” espoused “at present by Arminius.”57 Simonds’s Primitive Practise contains an assertion that is pertinent here: It may somewhat amaze the reason and judgement of any moderate man, though an Atheist, why the Pope himself or his Prelates and Clergie should so extreamely hate and violently persecute (even more cruelly then they doe Jewes or Turks) the Evangelicall partie, and especially those of the French, Scottish and Helvetick confession, who doe commonly joyn eminency of piety and godlinesse, with a most sound and absolute body of doctrine agreeable with that of the Primitive Church.58

Given this unequivocal endorsement of and enthusiasm for the Scottish kirk, it is initially surprising that the first mention of the rebellion in Simonds’s correspondence came not from him but from his brother Richard’s April 1638 letter. He wrote from Bordeaux that “the comocion in Scotland we euery day heare it affermd, and denighed.”59 When this letter reached Simonds is uncertain, but his response was brief and guarded. On August 6/16, he commented that “affaires of Scotland are yet in a sadd condition. God open his Maiesties heart to tender ther pietie & zeale & pardon ther errors.” Instead of explaining his thinking, he changed the subject. The next sentence reported that Richard’s horse had been sold for £5.60 He had told Joachimi just three days earlier that “the fear of Scottish war . . . I hear has been quietened by the gentleness of the king.”61 Five weeks later, Simonds reversed himself: “Would . . . that were true which I wrote in my last . . . concerning the peaceful settling of the feared Scottish war. I am horrified by dreadful rumours about it being about to break out soon.” If that happened, the consequences would “await our sons and grandsons.” He worried that the Scots seemed unaware that it might mean disaster for “their country, liberty, wives, children and themselves, and even purer religion.” Nor would there be “any firm safety of England” either. He then went on to discuss at length the way that “very small quarrels” had ended in horrific setbacks for the Huguenots in France and in the many “desolations of Germany.” The origin of the latter, for example, he traced to the decision of the Bohemian Protestants in 1614

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to build a church on the site of the abbey of Braunau, a step that the abbot protested and that led Emperor Matthias to imprison “some few citizens of Braunau.” The Protestant leaders in turn retaliated by summoning a diet without consulting the emperor, and the struggle escalated to the point that they elected Frederick V, the Elector Palatine, as their new king. Unfortunately, “that good prince” then “mixed himself too hurriedly with the flames of that kingdom.” Instead, however, of explicitly comparing the broils in Scotland to the Bohemian struggle that set off the Thirty Years’ War, Simonds ended his letter asserting that comparing “those separate matters to the present ones” was a mistake. “Let us beg the God of peace with fasts and prayers that he deign grant us eternal external and internal peace.”62 The gingerly way Simonds handled the Scottish conflict and the ship money levy show that he was careful not to let his letters contain statements that could be taken amiss by the Caroline regime while he hoped that the king might still relent and settle with the Scots rather than try to suppress them. He wrote in similar terms to others. The earl of Bath, for example, wrote on April 1, 1639, to thank him for his “advertisements of the present state of things, especially touchinge Scotland, for which I am very sorry, that they ar growne to that extremity.”63 Simonds was by no means the only person aware of the need for caution about what was put on paper at this juncture. Sir William Poley was with the royal court at York in April 1639, and in one of his letters sought “pardon” that he could send “noe fuller enformation” about what was happening. He then retreated into a vague statement about how events were “full of doubt and Varietye.”64 The vicar at Albury, Francis Commyn, wrote a Latin letter to Simonds on April 4, and its postscript displayed the same concern: “Everybody here greets you and yours . . . If anything happens which you can safely commit to writing, it would be most pleasing for your friends here . . . who only hear little uncertain rumors.”65 Simonds’s response to Commyn, dated May 7/17, was surely welcomed for its details. “In Scotland, where things now on account of religion have been disturbed for two years, all things are carried on actively.” The Covenanters had recruited “ten thousand footsoldiers & 5000 horsemen, with all the treasure, ordinance & several barrels of gunpowder.” The king had gone from York to Durham and had released Lord Brooke and Viscount Saye, after he had had them confined for refusing to swear that they would commit themselves to the suppression of the rebellion in Scotland. He had also sent Sir John Coke for talks with the Covenanters. Instead of tipping his hand with a remark about the Scots’ “purer religion,” Simonds contented himself with the anodyne prayer: “May God make him an agent of peace.”66

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This intense interest in Scottish events did not abate in the least as 1639 proceeded. In a letter sent from Venice on June 3, Richard told Simonds that he could not relate much Continental news because “newes of England is the only [thing] talked of both by vs, and strangers, & hath swalloed vpp alle other.”67 “Concerning Scottish affairs,” Simonds informed Joachimi on July 12/22, “I am well informed by an eye witness, William Poley, Knight, my brother-in-law.” The Covenanters’ army was under the command of Alexander Leslie, and Poley insisted “that their forces are less than I had thought, that many are semi-armed and few had good horses.” Simonds prayed that God would enable the Scottish parliament and the synod of the Kirk to achieve “the stabilizing of truth and piety” in negotiations with the king. Otherwise, “old wounds” would be “opened by new quarrels and hatreds,” and it was certain that “worse evils than the former ones will follow.”68 By November, Simonds’s predictions about the dangers ahead were coming true. “Wee are like,” he wrote to Richard on the 25th, “to haue sadd & dismall assizes, because all things in Scotland hasten on apace to distraction & tumult. Let us ioine our praiers that God may direct the iudgements that hang ouer our heads.”69 The war he dreaded—known as the Second Bishops’ War—did not in fact break out until August 1640, but there can be no doubt that it helped trigger many distractions, tumults, and judgments in the years immediately ahead.

The Iconophobic Puritan In 1636, Simonds wrote his treatise on toleration—The Primitive Practise—which was not published until 1645. In the preface addressed to his “Judicious Reader,” he said that he had written it “above eight yeeres since” but not published it at the time because he then lived “under the Prelaticall tyrannie of Bishop Wren” and knew “that the Presse was then only open to matters of a contrary subject.” The bishop of London presided over a system of licensing printed material that would not permit the publication of Simonds’s little book at the time he wrote it. He undertook it, he explained, not “only for recreation amidst my severer studies, but as a Preparative also, by which I desired to fit my self, either for a voluntary exilement, or a necessary suffering; I intended it only for a private use.”70 By “severer studies,” he meant projects such as his histories of Britain and of the Pelagian heresy, his collection and study of printed books, manuscripts and coins, and his extended forays into archives in London and elsewhere (including the muniment rooms of friends among the landowning aristocracy who valued his expertise). In the early 1630s, Simonds’s practice of listening to and taking notes on sermons and, privately with his family, praying, fasting, and continuing his devotional

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studies continued along the course he had set earlier (although he fasted quarterly rather than monthly after the middle of 1638). As we have seen, he worried obsessively about the spread of neo-Pelagianism in its various forms, including Arminianism in England and the Dutch Republic, but it did not impinge significantly on his own spirituality and its expression in worship until 1636. Before then, the threats to what he considered “the purer religion” loomed most dangerously abroad from the Spanish and Austrian Habsburg armies on the one hand and the pope in Rome and his network of minions (especially the Jesuits) on the other. In that period, Simonds’s biggest local problems with churchmen came from the nasty confrontations with Richard Damport, but these involved tithes and personal affronts rather than doctrinal and liturgical principles. In 1636, however, Simonds’s situation changed dramatically as the result of two events that occurred very close to his home. The first was the diocesan visitation conducted at Bury St. Edmunds in late March by clerics under the direction of the new bishop of Norfolk, Matthew Wren. The second was the sermon he heard preached from the pulpit of St. George Stowlangtoft on October 3 by John Novell, one of Wren’s chaplains (and the same man whose statements had outraged Simonds and Dr. Ward in July 1635 in Cambridge). Simonds had long denounced and opposed those he considered neo-Pelagians in Christendom, but Wren and Novell (and behind them, Archbishop Laud) propelled him to new heights of anger and zeal that now had a very personal dimension. Quite simply, they enraged him. It must be remembered that the final illness of little Clopton in May came between the visitation and the sermon and may have exacerbated their impact on Simonds. His responses to Wren’s visitation and Novell’s sermon, it will be argued here, were his decisions to write The Primitive Practise, his autobiography, and his treatise on idolatry. Moreover, these events and these works must be associated with his greatly increased fear that he might very well have to undergo “exilement” or “suffering,” meaning immigration to Massachusetts or persecution for the sake of his religion if he remained in England. On August 14, 1644, he mentioned in his Latin diary that he “corrected something in my treatise against persecution, written by me in AD 1636.”71 His writing of the autobiography and the treatise on idolatry cannot be dated as precisely, but they contain clues that place them around this time. In addition, remarks in other things he wrote during this period which will be discussed below strengthen the case for concluding that their composition was stimulated and shaped by the prospect of either emigration or persecution that reared up in front of him in 1636. That he began the autobiography at some point in 1636 is certain because of a marginal note near the beginning on folio

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6r. It adds information concerning the genealogy of his maternal grandparents and says, “this I wrote in the yeare 1636 since which time I was informed by Sr John Strangwaies . . . that the saied Thomas Simonds was the naturall sonne of Sr Giles Strangwaies knight which is proued by Record alsoe.” There are a handful of places where he mentioned someone in relation to an event before 1636 and added that the person was alive in 1638. For example, he wrote that John Ashfield “yet liueth this present yeare 1638 being about 78 yeares olde.”72 His account of the terrible day on which Charles I dissolved the 1629 session of parliament, the last until 1640, must have been written in August, 1637, because in it he noted that for eight years and five months “this poore kingdome . . . hath neuer yet enoied the benefit & comfort of that great counsell againe.”73 For the reasons discussed in the previous section, Simonds said nothing about ship money in the letters he wrote in the late 1630s, and the same is almost true of Wren’s visitation. As with ship money, however, Simonds attacked Wren’s activities frankly and scathingly in his autobiography. He there reiterated his hatred of the neo-Pelagians very much along the lines we first encountered in his “Indications of Certainty in the Matter of Salvation” (begun 1627, completed 1631) and in letters he wrote to Stuteville in February 1628 and Joachimi in December 1629.74 Consider, for example, the following passage from his news summary for 1631. In that year, despite the glorious successes of the Swedes against the Imperialists, “all Gods true children had continuall cause of lamentacion & feare” as a result of the “dailie growing & farr-spreading” of the Anabaptists’ “false and blasphemous” tenets opposed to “Gods grace & prouidence, against the godlies assurance & perseuerance, & against the merits of Christ himselfe.” These heresies were initially “broached by the hereticall Brittaine Pelagius about the yeare of our Lorde 410 & were re­ uiued” in the sixteenth century by Fausto Sozzini and Bernardino Ochino in Italy, Sebastian Castellio in Germany, Michael Servetus in France, and Desiderius Erasmus in the Netherlands. These men propagated “manie noisome & dangerous opinions” about rebaptizing children, polygamy, deposition of rulers, and regicide. Although Castellio and Erasmus had backed away from some of these notions “in their publike workes,” they still held to them “in priuate” and intended to establish them when they gained power. Following in the train of these men, the followers of Arminius, “a flashy diuine of Leyden in Holland, . . . haue called themselues by a new-inuented & false name of Arminians” in order to evade “ther first, ther ancient & still true name of Anabaptists.” They in fact deserved “a worse appellation” because in addition to all the rest, they also “practised the idolatrous adoracion of the altar, of the elements of the sacrament, &

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other creature objects.” As he would do in his brief to the Queen of Bohemia, he claimed that the danger this posed to “all Christian Kings Princes & gouernours” was horrific. “If once these new doctors & ther disciples, cann gett the sole power of the church into ther griping talons,” they would then pursue “the extirpation & exilement of all pious & orthodox Protestants.” It was these godly Protestants whose loyal presence in kingdoms protected their princes, and if they were gone the princes would soon be overthrown and replaced with successors who would dance to the tune of “these wilfull hereticks.”75 a trumpet blast against “altar-adorers” The preceding restatement of Simonds’s fundamental argument as presented in his autobiography did not refer explicitly to England, although if any of his contemporaries read it they would not have missed his implied association of Archbishop Laud and his admirers with the Arminians. But the reader who persevered through another fourteen folios came to a blunt and highly explicit denunciation of the Laudians. Tellingly, Simonds began with the story of the master of his old Cambridge college, St. Johns, early in Mary Tudor’s reign. Dr. Beale instituted “such generall adoracion to and towards the Altar & sacraments . . . that manie godly fellows and schollers of the howse” exiled themselves “to auoid the abomination; so as to them this . . . was a reall persecution.” Simonds noted with pride that in his famous Acts and Monuments, John Foxe reported that St. Johns had been “the first colledge in Cambridge” whose scholars chose to leave “in order to auoid the storme they saw readie to fall vpon ther heads.”76 He followed this mention of the Marian exiles with a direct condemnation of the Laudians that is as fierce a judgment as we can find anywhere in his writings: “Prelates and others now in England” had been busy ever since 1630 “to increase the multitude & burthen of the ceremonies & intermixtures in the church.” They had endeavored to “oppresse the consciences, or ruine the estates of manie godlie Christians, falselie by them nick-named Puritans, although free from all schismaticall & idle opinions.” They had also forced “manie thousands into America it selfe” where God had “blessed” the settlers “not only with outward safetie and plentie; but with the power and puritie alsoe of Gods Ordinances free from all burthensome ceremonies and superstitious intermixtures.” “For mine owne parte,” he insisted, “I haue euer maintained obedience to the magistrate in all lawfull things, & that the conscience ought not to bee enforced.” He followed this statement with an important distinction. He could “honour & esteeme a vertuous or learned papist” who assumed his religion true because he had been educated to do so. The Arminian

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prelates in England, however, were in a different category altogether. For such men “to call themselues protestants as Bishopp Laud Bishopp Wren & their wicked adherents” did and to “swallow vpp” lucrative church livings while opposing “Poperie in worde onlie” was unconscionable. Meanwhile they worked for “the ruine of the truth & gospell” by espousing and publishing “the most grosse & feculent errors of the Romish synagogue,” requiring “Gods day to bee profaned,” suffusing the liturgy with “idolatrie and superstition,” and subjecting “his faithful & painfull [painstaking] ministers” to censure, suspension, deprivation, and exile. The effect was “to threaten a speedie ruine to the power of Godlines,” and “this my soule abhorrs as the highest stepp of wickednes, and of preuarication against God & his honour.” Compared to the Laudians, Simonds accounted the Pope, the Cardinalls & Jesuites themselues Saints in comparison of these men. For as a few traitors within a beseiged cittie, are of a greater danger for the ruine of it then a whole armie without; soe doubtles what Theodore Beza saieth of the Pseudo Lutherans of Germanie is true of these men, that they do no less impudentlie and furiouslie weaken & vndermine the gospell & truth; then if they weere hired by the Pope himselfe at great rates.

As he was wont to do, Simonds concluded that “when diuines, schollers and others” yield themselves “vpp to a prophane vitious and an atheisticall life,” they then “hate such as bee godlie, as by a iust iudgment of God they are at lengh giuen vpp to the hatred of the truth it selfe alsoe.” Next, they adopt and defend “popish, Pelagian or Anabaptisticall tenents.”77 Immorality begot cruelty and even heresy. Laud, Wren, and their allies were not only theologically and liturgically deeply wrong; they were worse than the hated papists who merely reflected their upbringing. The English Arminians had been exposed to the truth and, while claiming to uphold it, had instead betrayed it in order to serve their greed for wealth and power. They had, he believed, truly mounted “the highest stepp of wickednes.” As indicated above, he adjudged Wren’s regime a “prelaticall tyrannie” in the preface to his Primitive Practise, and in a 1644 Latin letter he denounced Wren as a man of “a most damned life.”78 Cambridge was a long day’s ride from Stowlangtoft, but Bury St. Edmunds was only ten miles away. Bishop Corbet of Norwich, with whom Simonds had tangled over the antics of Richard Damport, had died, and Matthew Wren succeeded him in November 1635. On Tuesday, May 29, 1636, Wren initiated a visitation of his new diocese which opened at Bury St. Edmunds. The “griping talons” of the Laudians thus came closer, and Simonds watched the proceedings of Wren’s commissioners warily.79 According to the account of this episode in his autobiography, the bishop’s men examined the churchwardens for three days on the basis of “manie

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new & strange articles” that had not been employed in episcopal visitations “since the Reformation of Religion, in the beginning of Queene Elizabeth’s raigne.” He thus implied that the articles enforced practises that had been required by Marian bishops who were devoted to the pope and committed to the doctrine of transubstantiation in the Mass. Wren’s articles “ensadded the soules of all men that had anie truth of pietie; & these new imposicions manie of them, weere conceiued to bee soe dangerous and vnlawfull” that numerous “godlie learned & orthodox ministers either left ther liuings voluntarilie, or weere suspended & depriued in the two counties of Norfolke & Suffolk because they would not yeild vnto them.” Simonds applauded the Elizabethan removal of altars and their replacement with communion tables because its purpose was “to auoid idolatrie superstition & offence.” Under Wren’s retrograde policy, however, the communion tables had to be taken “out of the middle of the Chancels, and ordered to bee sett vpp close to the East wall of the same Chancels.” The ground under them “was to bee raised and the table to bee railed in.” The high cost of these innovations resulted in “the extreame oppression of the poore inhabitants” who were simultaneously saddled with the ship money levy. Wren’s articles also stated that the tables were to be placed “altar-wise” and that the presiding clergyman was to go behind the table to read parts of the liturgy. Many parishioners could not hear him from that position, and in the larger churches at best 20 percent could. Everyone was puzzled that “these men that soe much cried vpp the Common praier aboue preaching, would soe farre vilifie it as to haue the minister runn from the people, & to reade it at soe farre a distance as they could not possiblie heare.” Simonds asserted that he had asked Wren, when he talked to him at Ipswich, if this was not against the law and that the bishop admitted that it was.80 The sermon gadding Simonds took audibility seriously, but in his view the solid rock of offense was the idolatrous altar adoration that Wren and his master Laud foisted upon the laity in the diocese of Norwich. Bishop Wren understood very well that many of the Puritan ministers in his diocese who opposed his ceremonial requirements were held in high esteem by their congregations and the town councils and country gentlemen who had helped them into their pulpits. Simonds D’Ewes, like his friend Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston and many others, used his advowsons, patronage, money, and political influence to defend ministers with whom he sympathized when they got into trouble in the ecclesiastical courts. Wren was the sort of bishop Laud admired because he did not hesitate to confront his enemies vigorously.81 In January 1636, Laud had reported to King Charles that the entire diocese of Norwich was “much out of order”

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but expected that Wren would “take care of it.” Just over four months after the visitation at Bury St. Edmunds to which Simonds had taken such vigorous exception, he was dealt a painful humiliation on October 3 from the pulpit of St. George Stowlangtoft. The preacher that day was John Novell, now one of Wren’s chaplains. Novell asserted that the lord of the manor of Stowlangtoft was a Puritan and, as Simonds would have interpreted it, a heretic. Simonds said nothing about the incident in his autobiography or his correspondence, but the circumstantial evidence that it infuriated him deeply is strong. It is likely that it provided the spark that ignited his decision in 1636 to begin his autobiography and to compose his unpublished treatise on idolatry and his Primitive Practise. Except for his “indications of certainty” about salvation, these three works are the only ones entirely from his pen that he not only started but finished. Alternatively, he might have started work on them after the visitation in March and persevered with them because of the sting that October 3 inflicted. Novell could not have been preaching at Stowlangtoft due to an invitation arranged by Simonds, because we know how aghast he was when he heard about Novell’s opinions at Cambridge the year before. On January 8, 1641, in the House of Commons he mentioned that Novell had been one of Wren’s commissioners in the diocesan visitation, citing a warrant dated April 1636.82 As mentioned earlier, Simonds’s numerous sermon notes are scattered throughout his papers, and he rarely supplied the name of the preacher or the date or location. But he did provide these details in this case. Novell’s October 3 sermon nicely exemplifies what Alexandra Walsham means by “charitable hatred.”83 Simonds’s heading to the notes identified the preacher as “houshold Chaplaine” to Wren and stated that Wren himself was present. Novell has been described by Kenneth Fincham as an opponent of nonformity and a “ritualist.”84 His text was Galatians 6:2 about the need to bear one another’s burdens. The chaplain argued that this meant that, since the king obviously bore a heavy burden, “therfore wee must beare the burthen he laies on vs,” meaning ship money and other mulcts. In addition, “wee must mourne for the sinns of others & fast & pray if need bee for them.” Those who sinned “vnawares” deserved “lenity,” but those who sinned “obstinately” must “bee dealt roughlie withall.” In particular, “to resist order is to bee enforced with punishment.” Moreover, “it is dangerous to affect singularitie especially in going to heauen.”85 “Singularity” was a code word indicating deviancy of some kind, such as dissent or separation from the established norm in religious matters. Richard Chamberlain, the preacher so much admired by Paul D’Ewes and Simonds, had been complained of by a parishioner as “singular” in 1624, and it is possible that Chamberlain’s nonconformity

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brought Simonds the unwelcome attention from bishops that led to this event.86 Since he would never have asked Wren or his chaplain to come to Stowlangtoft, this sermon could only have been mandated by the bishop as a pointed rebuke and a warning that Simonds faced punishment if he persisted in his opposition to ceremonial injunctions. It certainly helps explain the venom Simonds heaped on his denunciations of Laud and Wren as worse than popes, cardinals, and Jesuits. Simonds was a proud man, and to be thus insulted and traduced as a puritan from the pulpit in his home parish by the minion of an “impious bishop” must have poured even more fuel on the fire of his hatred of the Laudian regime. A fragment of a letter from the Suffolk antiquarian Robert Ryece provides intriguing evidence that Simonds vented his agitation about altar-adoration in at least some of his letters to trusted godly friends while excising his drafts of them from his own papers. Ryece lived at Preston, only two miles from Lavenham, and Simonds could easily have sent one of his servants to deliver missives to Ryece and thereby avoid risk that they would find their way into the wrong hands. Simonds’s notes on Novell’s sermon appear on the back of this sheet.87 Ryece thanked Simonds for the letters he had written to help him to “resolve my propounded scruple” concerning the “new additions & burthen” of Wren’s ceremonial requirements. Ryece’s “scruple” centered upon the extent to which these could be acquiesced in “without Shipwracke of conscience” and at what point they went too far. In other words, when did it become the case that “all that had any conscience left shoolde thinke vpon flyghte or sufferinge”? As we shall see below, Simonds denied that kneeling to receive communion was an idolatrous act, and Ryece agreed that the English had long been receiving “with all reverence vpon their knees.” But suddenly they were being “courted & excommunicated for not comynge to the rayle.” Ryece thought that the Book of Common Prayer directed that the communion table “was to stande east & weste,” but Wren demanded that it “stande northe & south & so altarwyse.” If so then perhaps the restoration of crucifixes would be next. Ryece reported that he had observed too many crucifixes “in transmaryne partes, & desire the Lorde I may never see them heere.” “What meanes,” he asked, this “cryngeing bowing at & to the altars dayly increasing as superstitiouslye as it is in the colledges of the vniversitie”? What of the “vtter suppressinge of all lectures”? These developments heightened his suspicion that even “more fearefull thinges are cominge”88 Ryece, clearly, was of much the same mind as Simonds in 1636 about the innovations upon which Bishop Wren was insisting. From their vantage point, these things tended inexorably toward the restoration of the Roman Catholic Mass and papal authority in

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England. Obviously with no little pleasure, Simonds informed Joachimi in May 1638 that the church at Market Weston, just four miles from Stow Hall, had been damaged by fire. John Green, the rector there, was according to Simonds a lazy drunkard who worshiped “the altar with repeated bending of his body according to the recent custom.” He also proudly told members of his flock that “he would affix the image of the crucifix above the altar,” but God prevented the idolatry by purging “that very altar with fire.”89 Doubtless Ryece enjoyed this report as well if it reached his ears. By his own report, Ryece’s education had included “some yeares in the house of Theodore Beza at Geneua.” We would expect that a man taught by Calvin’s successor would abhor Wren’s altar policy.90 the treatise on idolatry Harley MS. 593 is a large folio volume containing, among other things, notes on and partial drafts of various writing projects that Simonds pursued over the years. It includes a fair copy in his hand of a treatise of approximately five thousand words that he titled “A shorte discourse digested into a few sections or Paragraphs clearlie proouing both Historicallie & Dogmaticallie, that All Creature-Adoracion is Idolatry.” By “creature,” he meant any material thing, living or dead. The margins are filled with references to various authorities, so its format resembles that of other works he intended at some point to publish but did not.91 Some of the points he makes appeared in his Primitive Practise and in his letters. The discourse on idolatry is undated, but it certainly reads like an answer to Wren and Novell and is situated in the volume soon after the notes on Novell’s sermon. The treatise provides a comprehensive and pugnacious assault on the altar policy that the Laudians had advanced and were attempting to enforce by means of diocesan visitations such as Wren’s. Simonds began by denouncing the appalling idolatry to which “some of the moore ignorant papists haue been soe miserablie besotted.” They had gone so far as “not only to depict God with three faces” but also in an old missal in Latin from Italy he had seen the Trinity drawn “with one face like an aged man to represent the Godhead & on his head a triple or Papall crowne.” To be sure, “this blasphemous Imagerie” had been repeatedly denounced by “all learned & moderate Romanists.” One of many proofs he offered to confirm this came from France. In September 1562, a conference of Protestant and Catholic divines had pronounced such depictions to be opposed to God’s commands in Scripture. He based this passage and much else that he wrote in the late 1630s on de Thou’s Historia, most of which he had read in 1635. Although Simonds’s treatise explores several forms that idolatry might take, he focused most sharply

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on the Eucharistic service. “To worshipp Christs humane nature separated & abstracted from the Deitie is idolatry,” Simonds wrote, “& therfore the Masse is iustly accounted the greatest idoll in the world.” The papists believed that priests could “make Christs body by the wordes of consecration,” but this could be nothing other than “flesh newly made & no parte of Christs glorified body.” Thus their “imaginarie breaden God” could not “bee adored or bowed vnto without manifest idolatrie.” Although the Lutherans had unfortunately retained a part of the “Popish error” in their notion of consubstantation, even they opposed “all bowing vnto & adoring of the sacrament as abominable idolatrie. Nay the verie Pseudo-Lutherans or Anabaptists . . . condemne the Papall Masse” as “a grosse & filthie Idoll.”92 Simonds did not limit the ambit of idolatry to representations of human bodies. The second commandment proscribed worship of “the likenesse of any other thing either in the heauen earth or sea.” Therefore to “bow vnto or adore anye relique bee it iron wood stone or any other materiall” or even “a crosse whether cut or depicted or an altar or a communion table” anywhere in a church “is as essential Idolatry, as to bow vnto or to adore an image.”93 Simonds asserted that the early Christians had always defined as heresy the suggestion “that men might bow down vnto or adore the Idols with ther bodies outwardly & yet reserue still ther hearts vnto God.” This was because “the very act of bowing” toward any object “is in it selfe an adoring of it whatsoeuer our intentions are; & soe a robbing God of that honour which hee hath reserued to himselfe.”94 “Adoracion of the Masse & of Images, of the crosse, reliques & such like” was, Simonds contended, “much moore excusable” in Roman Catholics than in Protestants because the former’s doctrine held that they were “to beleeue whatsoeuver the Pope decrees.” Protestants, however, rightly followed the teaching of St. Bernard “to obey man noe further then his commands are not contrary to Gods commands.” Since Reformed Protestant doctrine held that bread and wine remained bread and wine on the communion table, “noe adoracion cann bee due from a protestant standing to these protestant truthes without the manifest breach of the second commandment.” Simonds’s readings in the history of the Early Church convinced him that “the first Altar adorer or bower vnto the Communion Table” was a second-century heretic named Montanus. “Bellarmine himselfe” admitted that the Early Church Father Tertullian was the first to write of “bowing to Altars which hee learned of his Master Montanus.” Over time, “as the Popes & ther Vassals grew worse & worse,” Simonds claimed that they adopted the heresies of Montanus and others even though the men themselves remained condemned as heretics.95 Had Protestants been allowed to hold

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services privately as the early Christians had done, then they could still “preserue the comfort of a good conscience.” But to require them to “bow vnto or adore an altar a communion table or anye other object” was to force them “to shippwracke ther conscience & ouerthrow all pietie: as if they should runn into Adultery or drunkennes.” Simonds took care to specify that kneeling in a church to pray or to receive the bread and the wine was not to commit idolatry, since such acts could be performed with no intention other than “the worshipp of God alone.” In particular, receiving the sacrament while kneeling was “in it selfe a reuerent & an inoffensiue ceremonie, alterable at any time by authoritie.” It was therefore comparable to any “ciuill gestures” which men made with bows to each other (such as kissing the Bible in an oath-taking ceremony or kneeling or bowing to receive the Order of the Garter from the king).96 Here, as in other contexts we have noticed earlier, Simonds took care to distinguish between the reforms that had been introduced and maintained in England under Edward VI, Elizabeth I, and James I on the one hand and the innovatory “idolatry and superstition” he perceived in the Laudian ceremonial program. Simonds began the concluding section of his little treatise by citing Bishop Thomas Morton’s book, The Grand Imposture of the (now) Church of Rome (1628), which proved that, just as diseases such as leprosy and the plague were “necessarie causes of separacion from vnsound houses soe Idolatrie vsed in Gods worshipp.” In addition, “Tyrannie & persecution against the true & sinceere professors are necessarie causes of separacion from anie particular Churches.” On just such grounds Martin Luther and his adherents rightly left “the Romish Babilon.” “Ancient Protestants” in Languedoc such as the Albigensians and Waldensians had remained in the Roman church until the Romanists began to force them to bow “towards the Hoast, Images, Altars, reliques & such like Idols.” At that point they refused to perform obeisance to “Idolls, Altars & Breaden God,” and vicious persecution of them ensued. “What,” Simonds asked, “shall become of Gods saints in any protestant church wheere adoracion is given to an altar or communion table & that made the object of idolatrie”? What were the godly to do when “the horrible Idoll of the Masse [was] erected . . . in a Church professing itselfe absolutelie Protestant?” A Protestant could not “with a quiet spirit or safe conscience bee present at such abominations.” The “godlie Bishopps of England in the first reformation vnder Queen Elizabeth” had not only put an end to “all Idolatrous actions in Gods seruice” but also sought to eradicated the objects of idolatrous practices. The treatise on idolatry ends by reproducing a 1567 letter by Bishop John Parkhurst to two Suffolk gentlemen encouraging

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them to compel the patroness of the church at Ixworth to destroy “all the old ornaments of supersticon belonging to that parishe.”97 Parkhurst had served Queen Elizabeth I as her bishop of Norwich from 1560 to 1575, and Simonds’s contemporaries would not have missed this sharp contrast between Parkhurst’s hostility toward idolatry and Wren’s embrace of it. Wren, via Novell, attacked Simonds’s liturgical views in his own parish of Stowlangtoft, and his riposte in the form of this treatise was concluded by implicitly comparing a “godly” Elizabethan bishop of Norwich with an “impious” Caroline bishop of the same diocese. the treatise on persecution Neither Simonds’s treatise on idolatry nor his autobiography appeared in print in the seventeenth century, but his treatise on persecution did. The full title of the published work is The Primitive Practise for Preserving Truth or An Historicall Narration, shewing what course the Primitive Church anciently, and the best Reformed Churches since have taken to suppresse Heresie and Schisme. And Occasionally also by way of Opposition discovering the Papall and Prelaticall courses to destroy and roote out the same truth; and the judgements of GOD which have ensued upon persecuting Princes and Prelates. Its twenty-six chapters consist of evidence supporting his main argument, which was that heresy must be opposed only by spiritual means and never by force. On the first page, he announced his central argument: “it is the undoubted Mark or Brand of the Church Antichristian and Malignant, to persecute,” and the mark of “the Church Christian Orthodox and truly Catholike, to be persecuted.”98 By orthodoxy, he meant not Roman Catholics or Lutheran doctrine but the truth that “the Divine Providence vouchsafed to the Scottish, French, and Helvetick Churches upon their first Reformation.”99 As we have seen, this belief in the orthodoxy of Calvin’s theology had been consistent throughout his life, and in the late 1620s his researches into the early history of Christianity in Britain convinced him that the ancient Britons had been practicing pure religion as early as the third century C.E. He wrote that he could prove from ancient “scarce knowne” documents “the Gospel was planted here in the Primitive time” and that “the Protestants Religion flourished here” for nearly four centuries before “Austine the Monk, the first Popish Archbishop of Canterbury, poysoned the purity of Gods worship with his burdensome Trinkets and Ceremonies.” Moreover, this religion persevered “amongst the Welsh and Scots, to the dayes of John Wickleffe, without any interruption, and was secretly practised also in England” from the twelfth century “at the least.”100 This did not, however, mean that this pure form of Christianity had

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gone uncontested, for it was always under threat and frequently assaulted. Simonds drew attention to the year 466 as one moment when “the ancient Protestant Britains in Wales” who embodied “the Church Christian Orthodox and truly Catholike” managed to gain the upper hand and beat down the Pelagian heresy. Their leaders were godly bishops, but their triumph was short lived. The followers of Pelagius, the infamous Welsh heresiarch, assassinated the rightful king and his son and enthroned the duke of Cornwall, one Vortigern, who was “a Pelagianized traytor against his Soveraign.” Vortigern then turned over the bishoprics to “hereticall and lazie droanes, who had well-neere ruined the true Church of God in those dayes.” For Simonds, this was an early instance of the deadly combination of heresy, treachery, and lust that had plagued Christian kingdoms ever since. During his own lifetime, it appeared in the Jesuit Henry Garnet’s role in the Gunpowder Plot against James I in 1605 and the assassination of Henry IV of France in 1610 by “that wicked Jesuited varlet, Ravaillac.”101 By such means, Simonds extended the Foxean analysis of the wider Christian story and its British component into the late sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth by including the French civil wars of religion, the Dutch Eighty Years’ War, and the Thirty Years’ War. His domestic struggle with such anti-Calvinists as Wren and Laud fitted neatly into this sweeping narrative. Protestants in England and throughout Christendom, he insisted, must learn to bear with each other’s differences in nonessential matters, lest they subject each other to the persecution that the Roman Catholics had long visited on Protestants and fail to maintain a united front against their real enemy. Those who were “in all main and fundamentall truths . . . the true servants of God, the humble and obedient children of the Church, and of innocent and vertuous lives” should be allowed to “enjoy the Ordinances of God in peace and quiet.”102 This meant, obviously, that the effort of the Laudians to force parishioners to bow toward the altar and their insistence on punishing those who refused were unacceptable and unjustifiable. The broader history of Christianity, Simonds insisted, displayed a pattern. In every age, there were always countless people who subordinated doctrinal truth to the opportunity to achieve wealth and power. Such people “will alwayes run with the multitude, and be carried with the stream.” If Protestants today, they would “become Papists tomorrow rather then lose either goods, life or liberty.” They would become “the next day Anabaptists with Sebastian Castellio, and James Arminus.” And on “the third day,” they would “become Turks or Abisens [Abyssinians]” if so doing enabled them to “escape danger, and rise to preferment.” Once people pivoted “from truth to falshood, . . . there is no essentiall,

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but only a graduall difference.” The declension did not begin with an abrupt turn but meandered slowly. As soon as Constantine “filled the Empire with Christians, so Julian with Atheists and Persecutors.” In England under Edward VI many clerics “embraced the Protestant truth,” but after his death, “all again generally licked up the old vomit under Queen Mary.”103 The fifth-century victory over the Pelagians, like that over the Arians earlier, was temporary. The sad fact was that “Falshood, Heresie, mens Inventions, burthensome Superstitions intermixed with Gods Worship, and Idolatry, . . . consisting in mens bowing to, or towards Images, Crosses, Altars, Communion-tables, Reliques, or the like” had repeatedly been enforced by means of “sharp and cruell persecution . . . upon the goods, estates, liberties and lives of the godly.”104 Even the Protestant Reformation that had begun in the sixteenth century, had taken some false steps. D’Ewes asserted that Luther, although “learned and pious,” acknowledged on his death bed that he was wrong to have upheld “those two monsters of Consubstantiation and Ubiquity.” Luther’s mistake had been to rely on the advice of men rather than “Gods Word.” Fearful that the popularity of the Mass meant that the truth about it could not yet be safely told, he decided “to leave the rooting out of these weeds by insensible degrees to his Disciples.” The necessary uprooting had occurred in “the French and Helvetian churches,” but not everywhere. Instead, various “Pseudo-Lutherans” had “suckt in the poyson of the Anabaptists (the Devils Master-engine in this latter age, with the Jesuites, to restore Pelagianisme to the World).” They had also joined “old blasphemies that concern the advancement of mans free-will above Gods grace . . . to Luthers new Masse” with disastrous results. “James Arminius the Anabaptist, or Pseudo-Lutheran” brought these toxins to the Netherlands, even though in 1611 James I described him as “the Enemy of God.”105 That the struggle between light and darkness was ancient did not, Simonds opined, mean that the enemies of true religion did not keep inventing increasingly harsh and insidious ways to afflict the godly. A prominent theme in his Primitive Practise was that late in the sixteenth century novel devices were employed that exceeded the cruelties of earlier persecutors. The strongest medicine “that the Primitive Church . . . inflicted on the Heretiques of those times was exilement,” and the exiles were always given time to prepare themselves, obtain passports, and arrange to “receive by their deputed agents the yeerly revenues” of their estates (or to sell them). Before 1500, “the cruellest Tygres, and most Wolvish Prelates” who persecuted the godly had not gone so far “as neither to suffer them to enjoy their liberty and quiet of their consciences at home, nor yet peaceably and innocently to leave their deare and native coun-

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trey” and go somewhere else. Even such zealous enemies of the Protestants as Philip II of Spain, Charles IX of France, and (at least initially) Mary I of England had made concessions such as these to Protestants. Philip had even permitted “the very Mahometan Moores in Spain” to depart into France or Africa. But by the late 1570s, the “barbarous rage” of “some of the Popes” led them to pursue “the ruine of those innocent Christians” more vigorously than they did that of “the very Turkes and Mahometans.” In 1578, the Jesuits started “to teach and preach publikely” that God wanted “Christian Princes to root out and persecute all Sectaries and Schismatickes amongst themselves” rather than to “joyn their forces against the Turks and Infidels.”106 Referring to the writings of Suarez and Bellarmine for papal supremacy, Simonds argued that the popes had rejected the counsel of “sober and moderate Romanists” such as “Monsieur de Thou, (one of their own Historians)” and ratcheted up their crusade against Protestants.107 An excellent example of the new venom could be found in the experience of Henry IV, “the late great and victorious French King.” Having finally triumphed over the Catholic League, he granted his former foes “the publike exercise of their Religion.” They responded not with gratitude but with demands that he convert to Roman Catholicism. In 1593 he yielded to them and converted, but he found that “those unreasonable French Papists, being true limbs of the Romish Synagogue” refused to trust him and ultimately murdered him. By contrast, “his French Subjects of the Helvetick Confession” neither conspired against him nor rebelled. Instead they merely approached him with “humble supplications” for retention of their right to worship privately. “Blessed therefore are those Monarchs, Princes and States,” D’Ewes proclaimed, “who preserve the Evangelick truth, without the least intermixtures of false doctrine and Pontificall additions; for to halt between light and darknesse, and to intermix Idolatrous actions, or Popish errors, with saving truths, will necessarily draw on the ruine of the godly.”108 Although the cruel persecutors, whether princes or prelates, might create novel means of assailing the godly, Simonds found a consistent behavioral characteristic in most of their stories. They were motivated not only by lust for wealth and power but also by their voracious pursuit of illicit sex. His earliest example was none other than the fifth-century Christian king of the Britons, Vortigern, whom (as noted above) he described as a “Pelagianized Traytor.” Although he did not mention stories about Vortigern’s adultery in The Primitive Practice, he cited the twelfth-century historians Geoffrey of Monmouth and Henry of Huntingdon next to the following passage in notes from his reading: “before the Saxons coming reigned Vortigern . . . a man soe outragious in all kind of lust & soe irre-

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ligious in all kind of atheisme as pens & toungs are too weake & dull to describe his lust or decipher his Apostasie.”109 In fact, Henry’s contribution on this subject was brief; he merely wrote that “it is said by some” that Vortigern married Hengest’s pagan daughter and “that to compound his damnation he married his own daughter and had a son by her.” This resulted in his excommunication “by St Germanus and the whole episcopal synod.”110 Geoffrey’s account of Vortigern, by contrast, was much longer and packed with shocking details. In his version, Vortigern had first imported Pictish knights knowing he could easily get them drunk and set them to kill King Constans so Vortigern himself could capture the throne. Fearful of his enemies among the Britons, Vortigern then imported the pagan Saxon brothers Hengest and Horsa, and their many shiploads of their warriors to fight on his side. Vortigern, however, immediately fell for “Hengest’s daughter Ronwein, a girl of unsurpassed beauty.” When Vortigern met her, “he was amazed by her beauty and inflamed with desire.” He got drunk “on various kinds of liquor and, as Satan entered into his heart, asked her father for the girl he loved. Satan, I repeat, had entered into his heart, for despite being a Christian he wanted to sleep with a pagan woman.” Hengest decided to let Vortigern marry Ronwein in return for Kent, despite the fact that he was already married and had three sons and that Count Gorongonus, Kent’s ruler, would object. Thus Vortigern, ruled by his desire for Ronwein, betrayed both Christianity and the Britons by bringing in the pagan Picts and Saxons and permitting the Pelagians to continue their “poisoning” of the faith of the Christians. 111 Had Simonds ever found the time to write his history of Britain, Vortigern would surely have received considerable attention. Simonds opened Chapter XV of The Primitive Practise with a resounding assertion: “Were the Histories of Popish Prelates worthy to be joyned to those of Kings and Princes, wee might fill up a large Tract with Gods judgements powred upon them: For as most of them have been given up to lust and crapulositie, so have many of them been bitter enemies of the truth, and stingie [stinging] persecutors.” “Crapulosity” is gross excess in eating and drinking. He alleged, for example, that Cardinal David Beaton, archbishop of St. Andrews, had forged King James V’s will in order to make himself regent during the childhood of Mary Queen of Scots. He “wallowed at home in pollution with his harlots” and had the leading Protestant preacher in Scotland, George Wishart, strangled and afterward his body burned. Having witnessed the murder of Wishart from a chamber especially prepared “with Carpets and Cushions on the windows,” divine wrath fell upon Beaton just weeks later when he was himself murdered “in his bed, without law or justice” at the hand of a Catholic noble-

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man he had wronged. His bloody corpse was displayed “to the view of the people . . . upon that very window out of which a little time before, leaning at ease upon rich Cushions, he had proudly beheld the butchering of that godly martyr.”112 Hugh Weston, the Marian dean of Windsor who had led the prosecution that condemned the Protestant martyr-bishops Latimer and Ridley to death by burning at the stake, was widely believed to be guilty of drunkenness and sodomy. Simonds wrote that, like many other sodomites, Weston was “ordinarily branded by a beastly nickname, not befitting modesty to expresse.” God punished Weston “with that loathsom and infamous disease commensurate to that sin.”113 The princes who listened to the advice of such prelates as Beaton and Weston often ended their lives in ways that drove home Simonds’s argument about God’s punishment of lustful persecutors. Among his many examples were three of the Valois kings of France. Henry II, after losing interest in his wife, Catherine de Medici, “grew highly enamoured” of Pictavia of Valence, “a woman of exquisite beauty and good extraction, with whom hee long after lived in continuall advowtrie” [adultery]. In 1553 Pictavia convinced him to persecute and murder Huguenots so that she and her family could enrich themselves with the wealth of the victims. Ignoring the divine hand at work in catastrophic military defeats that ensued, Henry—“his heart already cauterized by lust”—proceeded to observe the burning of Protestant martyrs “as a pleasing spectacle.” In 1559, he died after a tilting accident in which a splinter from his opponent’s lance pierced “through his eye into his brain.” It was, in Simonds’s opinion, no accident but a providential condemnation of Henry’s persecuting ways that was further confirmed when three of his sons died violently “without naturall issue to succeed them” and thus terminated the Valois dynasty in 1589. Simonds next chronicled the Valois decline that continued under Henry II’s sons. Young Charles IX’s reign began well because at first he listened to sound and moderate counsel, but his mother, Catherine de Medici, soon persuaded him to revert to his father’s brutal assault upon the Huguenots and thereby set in motion the tragic and bloody civil wars of religion in France. Charles “had been long drenched in lust, (a sin seldome separated from a Persecutor) by his ordinary advowtrie with a mean wench of Orleance.” Yet after the horrific St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, Charles experienced “so stinging a remorse in his inward man” that it haunted him until his death. His attempt to escape the control of his mother and her ally the duke of Guise led them to administer a potent poison that caused him “many sharp and grievous torments” before he died in 1574 at age twenty-five and made “many blew spots and swellings” in his entrails (“as appeared upon his dissection”).114

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Charles’s brother and successor Henry III ignored the advice of “all sober and discreet Romanists” at home who saw clearly the disastrous consequences of religious persecution. Like his father and brother, Henry chose “never to sheath his sword, till he had utterly ruined the Protestants of France, whom some of their foul-mouthed fellow-brethren . . . have stiled French Puritanes.” “Infinite almost, was the treasure he spent upon his Minions and pleasures,” but not until 1588 did he realize his error in adopting the agenda of the Guise faction and begin—too late— to conspire against them. Their even more outrageous sexual behavior was judged most strikingly by God in the assassination of Henry Duke of Guise at Blois in that year and its aftermath. This bloodthirsty nobleman was stabbed to death just after he came “from the bed of his adulterate lust,” having “not been able to conquer the chastity of a Gentlewoman . . . before that night.” The first blow of the knife cut into his throat, and the blood pouring from the wound meant that “he never had time once to call on God for mercy or forgivenesse.” The libidinous duke’s sister, the duchess of Montpensier, hated both the Protestants and King Henry and sought revenge against them after her brother’s demise. She “prostituted her body” to Jacques Clement, “a Jesuited Monk” in order to “stupefie and harden his soul by that fatall sin of lust, that it might not startle at the commission of any other wickedness whatsoever.” She succeeded when “that Jesuited wretch (as impartiall de Thou himself relates)” stabbed the king himself to death in 1589 and thereby brought to the throne the first Bourbon king, Henry IV. In the first impression, Simonds wrote “goate” instead of “wretch.”115 In Simonds’s mind, the operations of divine providence in human history applied to whole communities and kingdoms, not just to individuals. In the last chapter of The Primitive Practise, the polemical providentialism to which Simonds and many others in England were addicted is evident. He related that on November 8, 1572, just three days after the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, a “dreadfull Comet” appeared about which a “learned Protestant” published “an elaborate and exquisite Poem, presaging that it was Gods Herald or Messenger to denounce his judgement shortly to ensue upon that Kingdome, for their newly perpetrated inhumane butcherie.” Soon thereafter in the French province of Poitou there appeared “a new terrible and before unknowne disease commonly called the Poitovin Cholick, which wasted that goodly Kingdome for above thirty yeares after.” Sufferers from this disease experienced “many extreame paines” both externally and “in the inwards and vitalls also.” Many went blind before they died, and the colic’s “unparalleld torments” seemed similar to “the very stabs and gashes made with swords and poy-

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gnards” that Huguenots such as Admiral Coligny had suffered during the massacre. Simonds thought that this proved that the “Poitovin Cholick” was inflicted by “the finger of God himselfe, in punishing the mercilesse murthers of his dear Saints.” It provided “a blessed warning . . . to all Christian Kingdoms and States” that their princes should ward off “the plague, pestilence, and other severall diseases and judgements” by eradicating the activities “of such Popish Prelates as count it their chiefest solace to waste and persecute the pious and godly Protestants.” When they did so, “the true Catholick Church might againe flourish, as it did in the Primitive times under learned, religious, sober, faithfull teaching Pastors and Ministers.”116 the lure of new england Wherever we look in Simonds D’Ewes’s writings from 1636 until 1639, we encounter his preoccupation with the question of how to deal with what he perceived as the looming threat to his ability to practice his religion. In the 1620s and early 1630s, the threat had seemed greater from foreign than domestic enemies although the advance of an anti-Calvinist faction of clergymen in the Church of England worried him. By 1636, however, those “Arminians” presented a danger that was as near as it was clear. Wren’s commissioners were energetically enforcing the new altar policy in the diocese of Norwich, and Wren’s chaplain had denounced him as a Puritan from the pulpit of St. George Stowlangtoft. The fact that explicit reference to this danger was virtually absent from his correspondence is itself evidence of how threatened he felt. For this reason, the evidence for his increasing interest in moving to America requires careful examination. That he received information about New England as early as 1630 and was writing repeatedly to Joachimi about the progress of the settlers there in glowing and knowledgeable terms in 1635 was mentioned earlier in this chapter. He also composed a list of arguments in support of the legitimacy of immigration to New England (or elsewhere) and answering objections to it. These passages total over eighteen hundred words, and their citation of de Thou means that they were written no earlier than 1635. Some of the points stress that the colonial efforts were initiated by men armed with royal letters patent that aimed at “the enlargement greatnes & safetie of his Ma[jes]ties Empire.” They would yield timber that could enable English shipping to expand at just the time that “the timber of England may in a few yeares faile.” Customs duties on fish and beaver pelts would enrich the royal treasury. The Indians could be converted to Christianity, as the efforts of Roger Williams proved.117 Land in the New World that England settled was territory that would not fall into

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the hands of Spanish papists who might use its profits to invade England. De Thou, though a papist, had praised the “fidelitie of the protestants to ther prince” and their willingness to go voluntarily into exile if they disagreed with his religious policy rather than rebel against him. Hence the Protestants did not disturb the peace of “ther deare and natiue cuntrie,” a sharp contrast with the fanatical Catholics. Some in England scorned the colonists as mere seekers of economic gain. But Simonds judged this a weak objection because the colonizing adventures were “a meanes to ease England of those exceeding numbers which long peace hath filled her withall.” Without emigration, the time would come when England would “not bee able to supporte & maintaine it selfe.” Thus the planters’ efforts were a source of strength, not weakness. They paralleled “our first & primeue auncestors . . . Saxons Normans or Picts” who had left their original homes when their numbers grew excessively. Others objected that the colonists left not for wealth but “for religion meerlie either in respect of Doctrine or ceremonie.” But for Simonds, if because of “weakenes of iudgment or tendernes of conscience” they disliked the Laudian church in England, “yet it is the glorie of the reformed religion that it consists in the vnitie of doctrine” despite variances concerning “outward ceremonies & church gouerment.” Thus, although “the adventurers doe differ in opinion” about governance, “yet are they still the true children & faithfull members of or church & are integrallie & perfectlie vnited to it in the vnitie of faith & of doctrine.” In this they were comparable to England’s Dutch allies who differed “from vs in ceremonies” but nevertheless “looke vpon the Church of England as ther verie last refuge on earth.” To support his argument, Simonds pointed out that King James had “neuer disrespected those learned men either of this nation or others whoe weere sound in the maine though they could not submitt to the ceremonies.” Yet James had also steadily “resisted the Popes vsurpacion & the Anabaptists blasphemies” that were defended by Castellio, Servetus, and Vorstius. Had the colonists remained in England, their differing views might have given “some offence,” but their absence and distance meant “they are noe scandall to others nor receaue offence from others.”118 Clearly, many of the same concerns that drove Simonds’s dread about the advance of Laudianism in England pervaded his thinking about “exilement” to somewhere in the New World. New England was not the only refuge Simonds investigated. In 1637 he received three letters from a kinsman, Sir Edmund Moundeford, a Norfolk gentleman who was an active member of the Providence Island Company. Other luminaries in the company included William Fiennes, Viscount Saye and Sele, and Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, and its trea-

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surer was John Pym. Simonds’s letters to Moundeford are missing, but it is clear that he had requested information about this Puritan colonizing effort on an island off the coast of Nicaragua. Moundeford related news of the company’s decision to send five hundred men led by three of the company’s members to support those who had already sailed to the island. “Sum of the Lords & others of great qualitie ar resolued to goe,” he wrote in one letter, and in another he described the planters as “men fearing God, desirous to inioy and aduance trew religion, which in any place will be hapines, & no place but is miserable without it.” He reported also “newes of a ship of ours returning with ample booty from the Spanish” and that “the place is highly commended for health & plenty.” Therefore “this work (thurough God allmighty his assistance) will be for his glory and the comfort of many . . . in these last, worst backsliding tymes.”119 There is no evidence that Simonds’s interest in the Providence Island venture led to action, but for Massachusetts the case is different. Besides the attempt to purchase livestock discussed earlier, by 1638 he was looking to buy land. Edmund Browne wrote a letter from Boston addressed to “the Right wor[shipfu]ll my much esteemed friend Sr Simonds Dewes” on September 7, 1639. In it he explained that the letter and the accompanying report formed his response to “your louing request to present vnto you a description of our new E[ng]la[n]d” and to recommend promising sites for “a plantation for your Wor[ship].” Browne said that he had “trauayled aboute to see the country” and that he had “seene good places the best for soyle is one merrimake within 7 miles of Ipswich and adioyning to New berry, yet for temper the southerne side is more exellent; wee haue grantes of 600 acres to some Gentlemen; there be many Lords that haue plantations heere.”120 Browne was a Suffolk man. Baptized in Lavenham in October 1606, he matriculated in 1624 at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He reached Massachusetts in June 1638 on the Nicholas and Frances and in 1640 became the minister of the church at Sudbury, where he remained until his death in 1678. In 1639, he married the widow of John Lovering of Watertown.121 Simonds assisted a group of thirty-eight settlers in Watertown, but it is probable that his acquaintance with Browne had begun back in Suffolk or Essex. In the letter, Browne expressed the hope that Simonds would show the letter and report at Bromley so that “your brother” Sir Thomas Bowes, “my endeered master & his Lady to whom I am much obliged” could read it. This suggests that Simonds’s sister Mary and her husband had been Browne’s patrons for some period after he left Cambridge. His closeness to the Bowes family is also evident from the fact that when he needed legal help back in England when pursuing some

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of his wife’s dowry that was owing to her after her first husband died, Browne sent his power of attorney to Sir Thomas.122 Preacher though he was, Browne did not lack an eye for economic opportunities. Simonds might, he understood, decide not to come in person in order to make use of his “refuge for harsh times if they should happen at England.” If so, he should “send some honest friend” or choose “godly and able men in agriculture” because otherwise his investment in land would be too risky. If he did not purchase acres, Browne suggested that he might venture, say, £20 or £40 or £60 “or more, as it shall please you” in cattle. “There is much to bee gotten there according to the custome of the plantation if the Lord blesse the increase.” Browne had already spoken to Governor Winthrop, “a godly and wise gentleman,” who “desireth to tender his respect vnto you.” If Simonds made this “adventure” of his money, Browne promised to bring over his father from Suffolk, a man in need of employment, to tend the animals and enable Simonds to profit and Browne to have “a stocke for a lotte, as the rest of the elders haue.” Moreover, “if yourselfe would adventure but the fifth of what you intended it will conduce much for my benefit the Lord blessing it.”123 The description that Browne also sent swelled to over twenty-six hundred words praising New England’s potential. Wheat, rye, and other grains grew well because “the soyle I iudge to be lusty and fat in many places” and would produce even more with manuring. Fruits of all kinds thrived, and there was an “abundance of strawberrys, rosberryes, gooseberrys red & greene.” From the sea came “greate store of fish,” such as sturgeon, salmon, halibut (“holly boat”), and mackerel much bigger than those in English waters. There were “oysters very large & fatte, greate lobsters, with other shell fish” and many varieties of freshwater fish, although these differed from those in English streams. Deer, hare, and rabbits were everywhere, and an astonishing variety of birds could be seen (and eaten). In addition, “heere bee humbirds feathered in colours and not bigger than a dorre [that is, bumblebee], (a strange wonder).”124 A fisher of men, Browne understood that Simonds thirsted more for knowledge of religion in New England than nature’s bounty there, intriguing though that was for a man who spent much time in the country. Browne described “our church way & order” in New England carefully, not least because he knew that many rumors about it were circulating in England that he thought false and malicious. The method of admitting members and choosing church elders and clergymen he characterized as “apostollicall” and stressed that members once admitted could be ejected only “by church censure.”125 This was fully in accord with Simonds’s opposition to the forcing of consciences. Next there was the problem of what

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Browne called “the controuersys,” and he claimed that they had been resolved by the exiling of “the opinionatists” (Anne Hutchinson and her allies) from the Boston area. Thus God “hath giuen a 2 fold peace vnto the churches heere (his name by praysed).” Mrs. Hutchinson had “led a side silly men & women into strange conclusions,” such as “that vnion with Ch[rist] is not by faith” and that “a soule may bee in Ch[rist] and yet Chr[[ist] not in it.” She also boasted “of her reuelacions and scripturelike certaynty.” However, the “2 monstrous births” that had since occurred to Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer demonstrated that God’s providence was at work against “these conceited persons” and thus vindicated the censures the Boston elders had imposed upon them. Browne went on at length about Dyer’s fetus: “still borne, yet aliue 2 howres before birth: . . . it had noe backe part of the head, the face stood low vpon the breast, it had noe forehead but 4 hornes . . . the backe & breast were pricky like a thornebarke, . . . vpon the toes on each foote weere 3 clawes like a young fowle.” Perhaps not wanting to end on such a note, Browne concluded by reporting that in 1637 “a knight and a Lady widdow besides other persons of worth” had settled in the colony and that “wee haue a Cambridge heer; a colledge erecting, youth lectured, a library” and the establishment of a printing press was expected soon.126 Simonds’s letters to Joachimi also provide insights into the reasons for his steady attention to and enthusiasm about New England in the late 1630s. His friend had just returned from a lengthy stay back in his homeland when Simonds wrote on January 15/25, 1638, to express his pleasure at the prospect of a resumption of their talks in London and, he hoped, when Joachimi and his family came to visit at Stow Hall. He repeated his fears that “truth and the Church will be beaten more by the blasphemous heretics, the followers and priests” of Servetus, Socinus, Castellio, and Arminius “than by open enemies.” These wily plotters wanted “to set up a corporal presence of Christ in the rite of the Eucharist and an idolatrous adoration.” The “Pseudo-Lutherans” who had already begun to do this in the sixteenth century, were “tricksters, lurking in the dukedom of Saxony and boasting falsely that they followed Luther” in order to justify their heresy. No wonder that the Saxons had since 1620 so often allied “with the papists against the Evangelical brothers of the Helvetickan purer confession.” The devastation of Saxony by the Swedish army in 1637 was God’s providence at work. Simonds expected that new catastrophes lay ahead for true religion in the Low Countries and in the British isles. If so, he wrote, “I do not doubt [that] the Lord will either supply the asylum of flight or unconquered constancy of suffering.”127 A subsequent letter, written on April 19/29, reported at length on “things concerning the found-

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ing of new England among the Americans . . . which is extraordinary and hardly to be equalled by the doings of former times.” Ever since 1629, English people had been going there, albeit “not without the growling of bishops and the contempt of the profane.” These brave colonists had “laid the foundations for the constitution of the finest church and republic.” They dispatched “heresies to Hell” and lived “a sanctified life.” Their population had increased from five thousand in 1635 to forty thousand in 1638. They had created “so great an asylum for all pious people that at present the papists and other impious men have begun to fear lest Christ reign there with his Gospel.”128 On May 15/25, 1638, he drew upon his pro-emigration arguments when he told Joachimi that the New Englanders would provide a notable enhancement of royal revenue. Therefore, “if they are held to be good, who would impede the attempts of good men? But if they are considered to be bad, why should we envy them being absent?” He then included several examples of previous princes he had described in The Primitive Practice who had assisted emigrants to leave for other places and shores.129 On July 27/August 6 he reported on the overthrow of the Antinomian heretics in New England, emphasizing the way that “the pious” there had “healed those exotic and monstrous, threatening dogmas.” Then he described Mary Dyer’s deformed fetus in detail and pronounced that it proved that “God’s outstretched hand” was against Hutchinson and her followers.130 Simonds presented his most fulsome depiction of New England’s success early in 1640. “The marvellous prosperity” there afforded him “so much solace amongst the public evils threatening almost everywhere.” In only nine years, “they have founded almost forty towns, adorned with beautiful building and villages.” A university was operating, defensive fortifications against Spanish attacks were in place, and ships were being built. The seas and rivers supplied a great variety of fish, and the settlers had 300,000 “large beasts” as well as numerous horses, pigs, goats, and sheep. Scarcely able to contain his admiration, Simonds told Joachimi that “I do not, indeed, know whether they put into effect a more exact polity in divine or in civil matters.” They dispensed “justice which is incorrupt” and also speedy (usually within three months instead of the many years that cases in England were strung out). Best of all, “there is the highest union of souls in the matter of religion,” so that if the necessity arose, God had in New England created “an asylum for his holy ones.”131 As in so much else Simonds wrote during this period, there were three central themes in his correspondence with his Dutch friend: the advance of neo-Pelagianism in all its forms (especially “altar adoracion”) in England; the evil of persecution for conscience’s sake and the virtue of toler-

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ation of difference “in outward ceremonies & church gouerment”; and the likelihood that either exile or persecution lay ahead for him and his family. Although he and many others knew that the turbulence in Scotland might lead to a parliament that would try to cashier the Laudians and outlaw ship money, there was no certainty of a parliament. Even if one came its success could not be assumed. For two decades, Simonds D’Ewes had been expecting the worst and preparing for it, so it should not surprise us to find him industriously searching for a refuge of the kind that the Massachusetts Bay Colony might provide. Surely part of that preparation was the writing of his treatise on persecution and beginning his autobiography in 1636. When he said that the former was written for “private use,” it seems likely that the same consideration applied to the latter. Certainly, if he had uprooted his family and planted it in Massachusetts, members of the succeeding generations of D’Eweses could easily read it to find out why he had believed it essential to move to “an asylum for his holy ones.”

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“An Iliad of miseries”—1639–1640

6

Simonds D’Ewes numbered most of his letters to Sir Albert Joachimi, and the sixty-second one was written in May 1640. In it, he expressed his thanks for God’s recent mercies. His son Adrian, just a year old, had been “time and again snatched from the jaws of death itself.” On April 18, his wife, Anne, had nearly drowned when the coach she occupied on the way to the baptism of a new Bokenham daughter overturned during a flood. He was immensely grateful that God had “given back my most delightful wife safe,” and he went on to describe the accident in harrowing detail. He did not know that she would die of smallpox fourteen months later, nor did he know that Adrian had just a few weeks of life left. What he did know was that King Charles I had called the first session of Parliament since 1629, and it had begun its deliberations in mid-April. Simonds, sheriff of Suffolk since November 1639, was charged with the unpopular task of collecting ship money, a tax he believed was unconstitutional. He told Joachimi that he hoped the Parliament would bring the levy to an end and thus rescue him and his fellow sheriffs around the kingdom from what he called his “fatal duty.” But if the Parliament failed to achieve this goal, “who doubts that an Iliad of miseries would follow”?1 This assertion proved prophetic, and he would long be intensely involved in those miseries. Until November 1639, Simonds had lived his life as a private person, although he hoped to publish works that would benefit the public. Unlike his father, he did not even serve as a justice of the peace in Suffolk. Aside from a brief mention in 1624 of his desire for a seat in Parliament that came to nothing, there is no indication that he thirsted after a place in government.2 From his abandonment of a legal career in 1626 until late in 1639, he had devoted his considerable energies and resources to what he called his “precious studies” of historical documents and artifacts. Many of these were ensconced in the library he was building—his “paper treasury.” He could afford to live the life of a gentleman scholar, and he rev-

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eled in it. Although deeply interested in and knowledgeable about events in the public realm at home and abroad and industrious in his effort to convey what he learned about them to his friends, he avoided public office until it was thrust upon him. Simonds conveyed the bad news in a letter to his brother Richard late in November: “it hath pleased God to send an vnwelcome preferment upon mee this yeare of the Shreivaltie of Suffolke.”3 Richard, writing from Paris on December 14, 1639, commiserated: “I am hartely sorry that in so troublesome a time the shrifalty is lighted on yow.”4 Simonds answered on December 30, telling his brother that although “wee have some assurances of a Parliament,” the continued pressure for collection of ship money “at one & the same time makes all men wonder: & makes mee despaire of anye happie successe in a publike councell.”5 Presumably, Simonds thought that, however unwanted and arduous this new task might be, he would at least be able to return to his studies when the year was up. Instead, just as his term was nearing its end the following October, elections were held for what would become known as the “Long Parliament.” Simonds would join many other members of this extraordinary assembly who chose to resist the policies of King Charles I with such zeal and vigor that civil war ensued in 1642.

The Sheriff of Suffolk Readers of this book will by this point understand that Simonds D’Ewes was a man who pursued his goals with astonishing perseverance. His performance as sheriff, however, greatly disappointed the king and his privy councilors. He employed his prodigious energies not to assess and collect the government’s target of £8,000 from Suffolk but rather to make excuses and explain why his effort fell short. As Peter Salt noted, Simonds sent to the navy treasurers only “about a tenth of the ship money assessed on Suffolk by the writ of 1639.” His predecessor had turned in about 75 percent of the sum demanded in the 1638 writ and still experienced “the Council’s censure.”6 To be sure, he was merely one of many sheriffs who failed to meet their targets. Dodging appointment to the shrievalty had in fact been a common practice long before ship money, and friends and neighbors routinely did what they could to help each other escape it. In 1627, Paul D’Ewes had written to Sir Martin Stuteville to report that he had learned that his “Brother Bokenham without his knowledge . . . was first in the Bill for sheriffe . . . I had but 6 howers to gett him out” and had received “a bushell of thancks” for his successful effort.7 In November 1635 Simonds must have known he was under consideration because he wrote to Marmaduke Moore, secretary to Theophilus Howard, earl of Suffolk, about it.

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On February 2, 1636, Moore responded that he had indeed been aware of “the danger you were in vpon the falling off of the sheriff that was prickt” in November. This brought Simonds’s name into play despite Moore having “taken order” to keep it out. Moore had nevertheless “prevailed” by using his influence with a “greate freind” and, in regard for Simonds’s “noble worth” would do his best in the future to find “a safe way” to prevail again by maneuvering the burden on to someone else’s shoulders.8 A letter from a friend at Barnard’s Inn written on November 5, 1638, mentioned that Simonds and several others he named were “in the Billes of the Sheriffes names” and that “much labour” had gone into sparing them. Fortunately, the king had chosen Sir Richard Brooke and so “for this yere yow do escape it.”9 After such near misses, Simonds may well have feared that his turn was coming soon. Late in 1639, the blow finally fell, and on January 6/16, 1640, Simonds broke the news of his appointment to Joachimi, explaining that he and others had pulled every string within reach to avoid it—to no avail. The king, he wrote, “made me high sheriff of this county of Suffolk at the beginning of November last past.” Ever the historian, he conceded that “in past centuries, magnates and peers of the realm” had performed this duty and that Edward, Prince of Wales, before coming to the throne himself as Edward I, had held the office. “But the times have changed and now almost only expenses and labour accompany the title which profit and honour used to accompany.” Moreover, he continued, the need to raise taxes to pay for an army to quell the rebellion in Scotland greatly complicated the task. After all, English kings had been invading Scotland for six centuries, and only rarely had they “gained anything afterwards but damage and disgrace.” Simonds related Herodotus’s description of the defeat of an army of 500,000 Persians by 140,000 Greeks. Pausanias, the Greek commander, had taken his colleagues to tour the Persian camp and to see the “the gold and silver beds” and “the luxury in eating, drinking and sleeping” on display there. This demonstrated “the madness of the King of the Medes,” who “came in order to rob us, we who have such poverty.” In Simonds’s opinion, “the softness and luxury of the English” might tell against them because Pausanias’s judgment could apply to the Scots as well as the Greeks because both were “content with few things and more fitted for tolerating labours and bearing vigils.”10 As word spread about Simonds’s shrievalty, condolences like the one from his brother Richard arrived like a flock of crows. On November 19, 1639, Richard Edwards wrote from the Inner Temple: “I beleeve by this time you heard of the troublesome office that is putt vppon you, for which I am most hartily sory knowinge how much averse it is vnto your na-

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ture to be.”11 In December Anne’s uncle Giles Barnardiston wrote to her to say that he was “sory for Sir Simonds chargable and troblesum office,” and to Simonds he said that “this is the yeare of all your trobles.”12 Edmund Calamy, one of Simonds’s favorite godly preachers, wrote a delicately worded message on November 22: “For the new office that is now deuolued upon you I shall pray unto God to inable you soe to discharge it in these troublesome times that you may haue the comfort of a good conscience in all things both to God & Man.”13 Simonds’s sister Jone wrote to assure him that God would help him in his “trobellsom office of shrefalty.” He had withstood other afflictions bravely, as he would this one, and his steadfastness in the face of them “much rejoices me or any that calls you Brother.”14 the illegality of ship money As noted in the preceding chapter, Simonds had made it very clear in the autobiography he completed in 1638 that the ship money levy was unconstitutional. In his opinion, the tax delivered “the most deadlie & fatall blow” to “the libertie of the subjects of England” that had occurred for five centuries, and this is the place to consider his objections.15 To support his sweeping claim, he began by arguing that the government’s claim that the money was needed to provide for naval defense was not plausible because England was at peace and its navy was strong. Demonstrating his knowledge of the high court judges of the kingdom, he pointed out that the two most senior and distinguished jurists, Sir Richard Hutton and Sir George Crooke, “weere great Lawyers and most religious honest men.” They were two of the four judges who had decided against the legality of the ship money writ in 1637. Both were “verie aged, & soe spake as hauing one foote in the graue without feare or affection.” Simonds thereby implied that either “feare or affection” or both had swayed the decisions of their five younger colleagues on the bench. Both Hutton and Crooke had announced “that the case was soe cleare & vndoubted” that to determine otherwise would have required them to violate their consciences and their judicial oaths. Their opinion outweighed that of the other judges because all the liberties of Englishmen would be “at one dash utterlie ruined, if the king might at his pleasure lay what vnlimited taxes hee pleased on his subjects; & then imprison them when they refused to pay.” How, Simonds asked, would “freemen differ from the ancient bondemen and villaines of England” if their wealth was “subject to arbitrarie taxes tallages & imposicions”? “In all my life I neuer saw soe manie sadd faces in England, as this new taxation called Shipp-monie occasioned.” This was not only due to the immediate expense but also because of “the ominous presage of the

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issue,” which led many flatly to refuse to pay, and many who paid did so “out of meere feare & horrour of greater danger.”16 Here and elsewhere in his writings, Simonds demonstrated that he fully understood that England needed a strong navy to defend itself from piracy and potential invaders such as the Spanish. Nor could English princes ally with other Protestant regimes to defend true religion without naval power, a concern that dominated his correspondence with Joachimi, Stuteville, the Queen of Bohemia, and others.17 Nevertheless, he insisted that there was a right way and a wrong way to go about serving this vital agenda. “For mine owne parte,” Simonds wrote in his autobiography, “I soe farre desired the peace & quiet of the kingdome, as I could haue wished this taxe had been annexed to the Crowne (to levie annuallie without alteracion) by act of Parliament.” Some had said the king would be stronger because he would not need to call parliaments if he could tax arbitrarily, but this could be the case only if it was in the king’s interest to lack “the loue of his subjects, to have Truth concealed from him; & to haue the distempers of church and commonwealth to grow vnto vncurable diseases.” William the Conqueror had understood this and quickly learned “the English-Saxon toung” in order to be able to “heare the complaints of his new subjects heer, fearing his Normans would bee too readie to oppresse them.” Simonds conceded that there had been times in English history when nobles had been “able to giue checkmate to ther Soueraignes, some Parliaments indeed prooued dangerous to the crowne & scepter.” All those incidents, however, had occurred before the sixteenth century, when “the gospell filled our English horizon with its light,” and since then parliaments had “not only prooued our Princes most faithfull councellors, but ther verie sanctuaries & fortresses.”18 Simonds next drew attention to other parts of the world where, unlike England, rulers routinely exercised arbitrary taxing powers. In Turkey and Persia, “the Mahumetan Princes haue absolute power not onlie ouer the goods, but ouer the liberties & liues of ther subjects alsoe.” Yet these rulers were not “anie iott the happier” as a result of the “wicked & tyrannicall” powers they wielded because the “abject & seruile” condition of their subjects made even bashaws in Turkey and lords in Persia “giue themselues vp for the most part to vice, idlenes & luxurie,” even when they were left in quiet possession of their lands. There were Indians in the New World “vnder the yoake of the Spaniard” who purposely refrained from intercourse with their wives so that “they might not beget slaues.” To avoid such a degeneration, Charles I ought to serve his own “particular good” and the maintenance “of the flourishing estate & safetie of this realme” by abolishing “for euer by his publike edict this vnlawfull arbitrairie & vnlimited taxation.”19

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Although Simonds wrote the foregoing outburst against ship money in 1638, he alluded to its central arguments in two letters written early in 1640 and in notes from his reading. In his survey of foreign news in a letter to Joachimi, he described himself as “saddened by the taxes imposed . . . in a Mohammedan manner” on Normandy the previous summer by Louis XIII.20 To André Duchesne in Paris, he recalled the time when Henry IV had demonstrated “that dominion and liberty” could be “joined under the best prince.” But “now Christian kings do not cease (oh sorrow) from imposing taxes at their pleasure in a Mohammedan fashion.”21 Several sheets of notes on taxation also reflect his thinking about ship money and other taxes. They are laid out with spaces between them in a common-place book style under the simple heading, “taxes.” Some were drawn from de Thou and thus certainly made after 1635, and others were probably culled from his collections concerning the reigns of kings that he had been making ever since 1624 for his history of England. For example, one passage asserts that the cause of “the bloudie warrs” during the reigns of John and Henry III was “ther oppression of the subject with illegall taxes.” Then Edward I became “one of the most powerfull Princes at home & the most victorious abroad” in English history, and he did it by “absolutely renouncing” those taxes and “confirming the Great Charter with which his father & Grandfather had soe often plaied fast & loose.”22 Placed together are these statements: “In all Christian commonwealths a right of meum & tuum by Gods law & mans law,” and “Wheeresoeuer the right of estate is lost the right of life is lost alsoe as amongst Turkes Persians & the greater parte of the Indians.” These are followed by a series of examples from different Christian states in which arbitrary taxation was imposed and catastrophe followed (such as the Duke of Alva’s “tenth penny” in the Low Countries that helped set off the Eighty Years’ War between the Spanish and the Dutch).23 With respect to ship money itself, a longer passage begins by asserting that English kings had long defended the coastline with ships “maintained by the sea-townes.” The resulting imports had yielded customs duties in sufficient amounts so that no taxes were “leuied vpon the lands of men for maintenance of sea-forces.” Therefore, if the king had power “to lay what charge of shipps it shall please him vpon all his subjects,” then he could do it not only “annuallie but monethlie weekelie & dailie,” since “the iudgment of the danger” lay in his hands alone. Therefore “euerie thousand” he took could be increased by a factor of ten or twenty or a hundred “vpon anye shire at a time.” This meant that he had “the absolute right of euerie mans estate in England,” not because he could “directlie take any mans lands” but because the tax burden would force the landowner to “quitt the possession.” Elsewhere

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in Christendom, people had “counted it the better . . . to let ther lands & howses lie wast” than to see the fruits of all their labor swept away by taxation. In England, he insisted, the people had never denied “ther Prince in Parliament sufficient releif for the defence of sea & lande: & by missing Parliament how shall hee euer know the truth”?24 Toward the end of these notes, Simonds inserted a statement from King James I’s Basilikon Doron. James wrote it as a compendium of advice for his heir, Prince Henry, but we know that Prince Charles conned it thoroughly.25 Simonds must have hoped that, as king, Charles would at some point remember this passage: “And aboue all enrich not your selfe with exactions vpon your subjects, but thinke the riches of your people your best treasure, . . . And in case necessitie of warrs or other extraordinaries compell yow to lift subsidies doe it as rarelie as ye can, employing it onlie to the vse it was ordained for.”26 This last proviso would have been particularly attractive to Simonds in 1640 when he expressed concern that a naval blockade against the Scots would undermine the ability of the Covenanters to resist Charles’s campaign to force them to use the Laudian liturgy.27 When he wrote—but did not deliver—a speech intended for the Long Parliament late in 1640 or early in 1641, he drew upon many of these arguments while also expanding the historical framework in which he placed them. He began by noting that “vnder a good & a gracious Prince wee shall find it as easie to ioine Imperium et libertatem heere, as Tacitus reports it was at Rome vnder Traian the iust or learned de Thou in France vnder Henry the Great.” Throughout the speech, he referred to King Charles as a gracious prince and then claimed that it was not his purpose to argue that the monarch should be asked to give up “anie parte of the ancient true Regall power vested in anye” of his predecessors. Rather, Simonds considered it his duty to assert that Charles should “abolish . . . this fatall illegall & arbitrarie taxe or leuie, vsuallie called shipp monie [so] that the remainder of his manie daies & yeares may bee spent with as much glorie & happines as soe good & soe great a Maiestie cann bee capable of.” Simonds stated the core of his case quite simply: “the Lawes liberties & propriety of the free-men” of England “are actuallie destroied” by “this habituall infinite arbitrarie power” whether or not it was actually exercised and practiced.28 Simonds’s speech next examined the history of English kings and laws beginning with the Saxons in order to prove that at no time in the past had a monarch held such an “infinite” power to tax. Hidage under the Saxons was “a certaine tax,” and so was “Dane-gelt” under the Danish kings. William the Conqueror had claimed a hereditary right to the English Crown and so was bound by the earlier precedents.29 He and his im-

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mediate successors imported the “Norman custom of tallages,” but these were not unlimited either. Simonds had seen, some seven years earlier in “the poll office,” a roll from the nineteenth year of Henry III’s reign that clearly showed that this tallage “could bee imposed but once yearelie.” Even the levy called scutage, first charged under Henry II, was never an “infinite arbitrarie tax” upon all subjects but applied only to knights. And “the free men paid noe tallage, the bondmen noe Danegelt nor scutage.” Yet “this arbitrarie leuie of shipp-monie hath noe bounds or limitation for time persons places or measure.” Because it “would ruine the kingdome in time,” it was opposed to the interests not only of all the people of England but to those of the king himself. Not only would it turn the kingdom into “almost a desert wildernes,” but it would also threaten the king’s safety because “the losse of the hearts of the subject, is the greatest danger that can or may befall a Prince.”30 It also undermined the king’s honor because it made him “a king of bond-men & not of Freemen.” Finally, it damaged “his reputation abroad” because “when a Prince rules iustlie & graciouslie at home, then he is feared abroad.” Simonds’s conclusion was a shot aimed at the five judges who had ruled in 1637 against John Hampden, the rich Buckinghamshire gentleman who had refused to pay the ship money levy: “God forbid that wee should soe much as dispute whether a iudgment in the Exchecquer chamber cann subvert either the fundamentall rights of the Crowne or the fundamentall rights of the subiects of England.” King Edward III had made a declaration “in open Parliament, which is entred vpon Recorde to remaine for his glorie to all posteritie. That the Lawes of this Realme cannot bee altered or changed, but in Parliament.”31 the (non)- collection of ship money Despite these strongly held views, in his correspondence from 1635 until he took his seat in the Long Parliament in November 1640, Simonds made no statements embodying any of the arguments against ship money discussed above. His autobiography seems to have remained carefully sequestered, and we know of no one who read it at the time. It is possible that he hoped it might have a role in some future debate over taxation, and there is no reason to think that he would have kept his views under wraps if he could have vented them efficaciously and safely. Nor is there any evidence that he followed the example of those who had would not pay the tax. We must therefore ask, with Peter Salt, why Simonds would “develop both a powerful constitutional case against ship money, and an alarming vision of its implications” while keeping them entirely or almost entirely to himself.32 Part, but only part, of the answer is the obvious one

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that he sought to protect himself against charges of sedition or worse, a concern ever present for him because of the disaster that had overtaken his friend and mentor Sir Robert Cotton. Simonds’s caution was by no means unusual. Consider, for example, this remark in a March 13, 1640, Latin letter to him from his friend Patrick Young (Patricius Junius), King Charles’s librarian. Speaking of a newsy letter from “our mutual friend Seton,” Young warned that “to speak what rumour everyday spreads among the people is not without danger and, to actually write anything about the present state of things, which appears to be in doubt, can result in the punishment, prison or proscription. Therefore we must flee to prayers and tears, which are the sole refuge in times of danger.” He went on to express his hope that the king and the Parliament that was ensuing would find a solution that would avoid “intestine war” and “the effusion of civil blood.”33 In his article, Salt lays out a deeply researched, thoughtful, and convincing explanation for Simonds’s course of action in some circumstances and inaction in others as high sheriff of Suffolk. He notes that Simonds pled that his absorption in scholarly pursuits left him unprepared and ill-fitted to serve effectively in the office. If so, then “his apparent failure at any stage to take the process of rating ship money assessments between or within parishes into his own hands” could be blamed on his inexperience in public affairs and lack of knowledge of the county. Nevertheless, when confronted with an attempt by Sir William Playters to move the election for the Short Parliament from Ipswich to his own base at Beccles, Simonds prevented it. The most likely reasons were that Playters had been busy at “the disciplining of troops pressed for the Scots war” and that “his brother was a Laudian clergyman.” Salt concluded that “D’Ewes’s grasp of local affairs was apparently firm enough when action on his part was likely to prevent gains by interests to which he was hostile and to win him credit amongst his countrymen.”34 Nor, it appears, did he limit himself to putting stumbling blocks in the way of his ideological enemies. He also promoted the selection of godly MPs. His dear friend and kinsman Sir Nathanial Barnardiston wrote to him on November 5, 1640, asking his help to secure a seat for his son at Sudbury because the bailiff at Ipswich was proving uncooperative there, and just five days later Simonds wrote to Lord Keeper Littleton questioning whether the Ipswich bailiff could return himself as a burgess for his town.35 Simonds also supported Sir Philip Parker’s election as one of the shire knights for Suffolk (the other was Sir Nathaniel).36 Salt also demonstrates that there are good reasons to think that Simonds sought mainly to impede the ship money levy. One way that he

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did this was to report to the Privy Council that the slackness of trading, poor prices for agricultural goods, and the burden of military demands in Suffolk had simply made it impossible for people to pay. Indeed, in a long letter he wrote on September 14 to the king’s lord chamberlain, Philip Herbert, earl of Pembroke, he estimated that “this poore countie hath been charged with militarie affaires this yeare and the last . . . with the summe of about £30,000,” an amount nearly four times greater than the £8,000 initially called for from ship money. He urged Pembroke to find an opportune moment to inform the king of the impossibility of collecting the levy under these circumstances. He claimed that neither “default nor contempt” had played any part in his inability to perform the service; rather, it did not “lie in my power to gett it in,” even if the king chose “at the end of my yeare [to] take away my life in default thereof.”37 If Simonds had not kept copies of his instructions to the constables, we would not know that he had himself on June 8 called upon them to give their “reasons in writing” as to why they had not raised the sums that had been demanded.38 He also alleged administrative barriers to his efforts. On February 3, he petitioned the Privy Council to extend the deadline of March 2 for delivering the money to the naval treasurers on the grounds that without more time “for the assessing rating collecting & paying in” of the sum, the king’s “gracious pleasure will bee wholly frustrate, it being a matter altogether impossible.”39 Not until the Privy Council initiated proceedings against him and many other sheriffs in July 1640 did he belatedly take some of the steps that more zealous sheriffs had taken to crack down on lesser officials whom he had been attempting to protect from royal wrath.40 Behind Simonds’s strategy of delay in the collection of ship money, Salt argues, lay two hopes. The first was that the king might yet be persuaded by some of his own courtiers that ship money should be abandoned. These men and their allies in the countryside understood that there was nothing to be gained by insisting on the illegality of ship money but a chance of success if the king and his advisers could be convinced of the inability of the country to pay it or the impossibility of collecting it. Paradoxically, this strategy was connected with the second hope—that the king would call a Parliament that would find a way to bring about an end to ship money. People who had resisted paying by various devices were strengthened in their resolve by the spreading expectation that the levy’s days were numbered. Salt cites, among others, Sir William Poley’s remark, probably in December 1639, that a decision had been made to call a Parliament that would begin in the middle of April which “might allay the further proceeding of shipp moneys.”41 Also, at the end of January 1640,

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Edward Letam wrote to Simonds that “it is thought the Parliament will begin before Easter, but noe writts are as yet awarded.”42 A Scot who was also a gentlemen of the king’s privy chamber, Sir John Seton, like Simonds had strong sympathy for the Covenanters in Scotland. On June 19, Seton wrote from London and urged Simonds not to believe the “vyle aspersion & a wicked lie” that was circulating to the effect that the Covenanters had “slaine many. . . . I will assure yow no creature, except it be hens or Chikens” had died at their hands.43 Two weeks earlier, Seton had written of his optimism that despite the “afflictions & troubles” that appeared so menacingly, God could nevertheless “dyspell all these clouds, & giue us the sunshine of his mercie to comfort us.” Sir John added that he thought that “before yow be out of your Shrivaltie things may alter from the present esteat to a better.” Even though the king continued his preparations for war on the Scots, “yet god may cause him [to] relent.”44 Salt plausibly suggests that hopes such as these led to Simonds’s impassioned petition to the king in the spring of 1640. In it, he wrote that he had “with infinite greife and astonishment perused the letters” that accused him of “contempt and neglect” in the fulfillment of his task. He insisted that he had not “in the least point swarued in that busines from his faith & allegiance” and had striven with “greate care and diligence” to perform it. He promised “to search out the true & iust causes why the whole remainder of the said eight thousand pounds cannot possiblie bee collected by your Roiall Majesties said poore petitioner.”45 After the king summoned a new Parliament in the autumn and, in effect, admitted his political impotence in the aftermath of the Scottish seizure of Newcastle, Salt found that even at this late stage Simonds “still did not make explicit the constitutional case which he believed to exist against ship money.”46 This was because, as an admirer of Tacitus, his tactic was the one that “prudent men had, under tyrannical regimes” pursued by avoiding “an unseasonable frankness.” On this reading, Simonds’s position supports those historians who suspect that “the gentry concealed, behind the loyal rhetoric with which they carried on their correspondence with the Council, both their own hostility towards the levy and the extent to which there was willful (or, at least, calculated) obstruction in the shires.” This “obstruction” can be seen not only in his conduct but also in the actions of the constables in Suffolk and elsewhere when they refused to set rates yet did not say so to the sheriff (who knew but did little about it). From this perspective, Salt suggests that “D’Ewes’s avoidance of ‘unseasonable frankness’ may reflect an expectation, which was furthered by his knowledge that the court was not ‘of one mind,’ that if ‘moderate Spirits’ like himself were to co-operate with the crown, it would listen sympatheti-

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cally to their arguments.”47 The phrase “moderate Spirits” is from his letter to Pembroke, the lord chamberlain and thus a man with direct access to the king. Where religion was concerned, Simonds’s rigidity and zeal on the central points of his beliefs lay a step higher than it did with constitutional matters. But even there, as Salt points out, he took care to stress his “obedience to the magistrate in all lawful things.” This was, however, a deftly formulated phrase that Simonds took to mean he could and should reserve to himself the definition of “lawful things” and refuse to obey if the authorities demanded idolatrous acts of worship. Neither the ship money levy nor Laudian ceremonies were lawful things for Simonds, but he knew about the need to avoid “unseasonable frankness” in exchanges with the monarch. He understood the game as Elizabeth I and James I had played it, and it was Charles I’s tragedy that his inability to hear certain kinds of arguments made it impossible for him to comprehend the game. There can be no doubt that Simonds’s attempt to perform his duty as the high sheriff of Suffolk took up enormous amounts of his time, by no means all of which went into epistolary fencing with the king’s councilors at Whitehall. His correspondence with mayors of the towns in Suffolk and the chief constables who were primarily responsible for collecting the tax was extensive, and he met with many of these people repeatedly. In addition, numerous individuals in Suffolk consulted him about the levy, and here one example will suffice to illustrate the kind of problem that sheriffs confronted repeatedly. A widow, Lady Elizabeth Clere, was a sister of the fervently puritan Sir Thomas Wroth, a supporter of the famous attempt to dig up and destroy episcopacy by “root and branch” in 1641. Lady Elizabeth would herself support the Scottish cause and the Long Parliament in the 1640s with loans.48 She owned and sometimes lived in a house at Cotton in northern Suffolk, and in April 1640 she wrote three letters to Simonds describing first her fear and then her certainty that her property would be unfairly treated for purposes of the ship money levy. In the first, dated April 13, she said that she knew that his warrant had specified that the constables of Cotton should return £31 18s 6d and that the townsmen had not yet set the rate, although they had held meetings to discuss it. She asserted that her “abyding place” was not Cotton but London, where she had paid the amount required, and that she had only an acre and half of land and part of a house in Cotton. There were, however, “some three or ffoure Malignante P[e]rsons” who “do gouerne the Towne of Cotton the waye thay list” and intended to set her rate at a high level because they claimed that she had extensive holdings in Suffolk. Denying this, she sarcastically said that as “for my greate personall esstate, if thay can make it appere, where in trouth it is, I shall bee uerie gladd of it.” Not satisfied to

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leave the matter there, she went on to attack her enemies as men who had long sought to pile the burden on everyone else while assessing themselves minimally. Her first target was “Mr Anthony Mowsse,” whom she felt justified in calling “my Lorde Mowsse” because the former sheriff and the local gentleman Sir Edmund Bacon had so referred to him. This was because Mowsse “did laye aboute him with us his poore neighboures, espechiallie with me.” Lady Elizabeth also charged that a relative newcomer to Cotton, goodman Browne, was a member of the four-man junta and had told people that the parson had mortgaged his house to her for £50 per annum, a malicious falsehood for which Browne should “haue halfe a skoore lashes in Bridewell.”49 On April 21, Lady Elizabeth wrote to the sheriff again to repeat many of the points made in her first letter but informing him that the constable had said that her rate had been set at what she alleged was the unconscionable amount of thirty shillings.50 Either Simonds intervened or Mowsse and his henchmen backed down on their own, because on April 25 Lady Elizabeth sent her final letter to the sheriff. Her new rate was two shillings, rather than thirty, but she remained irate. She alleged that she was willing to pay on her acre and a half and the ten rooms in her house, but that others with comparable holdings were rated at three pence, not two shillings. She asked him to accept that she would not have bothered him “for so poore a matter” except that “the soufferinge of one wronge is the begittinge of an other.” Once established, that differential would persist and she would overpay repeatedly. That, she asserted, had been the essence of John Hampden’s case and Judge Crooke’s opinion about it.51 She was wrong about that point but shrewd to mention those names when addressing Simonds. Her argument was directed against any kind of arbitrary taxation. We cannot rule out the possibility that she had spoken to him about it or knew someone trustworthy who was familiar with his private opinion about the legality of the levy. Cotton is about ten miles east of Stowlangtoft and thus in his neighborhood. That he knew her is confirmed by a postscript to a letter that his sister Grace Bokenham wrote to Anne D’Ewes on March 26, 1640: “my lady Clere presents her loue to your selfe and my Br[o]ther.”52

The Anglo-Saxon Dictionary The abrupt dismissal of the Short Parliament on May 5, 1640, after its refusal to provide Charles I the funds he needed to suppress the rebellion in Scotland, meant that his need for money would prevent him from withdrawing the levy as sheriffs and many others all over the kingdom had fervently desired. But the rebellion also drew the attention of the king and

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his councilors toward the north. If his army were to vanquish the Covenanters, perhaps he could still prevail. Rumors and fears swirled, and in at least one instance they had the odd result of connecting the Scottish crisis with what might have seemed to be a subject far away from it—Simonds’s scholarly interests. Despite his workload as sheriff, he tried to continue his researches in an atmosphere of mounting anxiety. Soon after the Scottish army under Leslie seized Newcastle in August, a panicky Abraham Wheelock wrote hurriedly to Simonds from Cambridge to ask how to protect the rare manuscripts if the Scots marched south. He feared that Leslie would “sett fire on these rare monuments, far more pretious then all the treasure he (I hope) shall get in England.” The “Scots care not much for Antiquitie,” and although he “loued their zeale to truth,” they had pillaged Newcastle “& we here alreadie quake for want of coles.” If they headed toward Cambridge, he sought Simonds’s advice about “where to hide under ground these Reuerend Saxon Sermons.”53 Wheelock had been Cambridge’s librarian since 1629 and was known for his prowess in Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Persian, and Anglo-Saxon. Wheelock knew of the D’Ewes library because he had written on January 26 that although he was “keeper of the Vniversity bookes, yet not of such treasures as you have gathered.” Simonds relied on Wheelock to get access to texts he needed, especially since he had fallen out with Sir Thomas Cotton, Sir Robert’s son and heir, in 1631. Wheelock promised to have anything Simonds wanted transcribed from the copy of Aelfric’s work at Trinity College and thought he might be able to borrow it for him “for a fortnight . . . . I shall try what may be done, if doone without noise.” He also sketched out his project “to compile a body of Diuinity . . . of our doctrine out of the Saxon & Brittish writers” in order to show the papists that the Protestants owed “more to the Easterne church, then to Rome: & what good from Rome . . . that we haue from the Easterne.”54 This delighted Simonds, and thus began a voluminous exchange of letters, ideas, and questions. The vicar of Albury, Francis Commyn, wrote to Simonds soon after learning of his “recently acquired honour of sheriff: You know what is said amongst the vulgar, honour is a burden.” Commyn had also heard that Simonds was “totally involved with your Anglo-Saxon Etymology or Lexicon” and urged him to carry on with this project and his “other monuments of indefatigable industry.”55 The exchanges with Wheelock and others in 1640 confirm that the shrievalty, although it certainly slowed his progress, did not prevent him from devoting attention to the Anglo-Saxon project. On January 23, just three days before Wheelock wrote his first letter to Simonds, Simonds was describing himself to Duchesne as a mere beginner in “our own Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic.” As he put it, he was “so far

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only a ‘leorning cnihta’ as the ancient Angles called a learner.”56 Wheelock wrote from Cambridge on February 2 to thank the sheriff for his “most quicke lines, full of virtue, learning, & piety” and to report on the loans of various items. The librarian explained that he could lend some volumes “vppon a scedula vnder yor hand” for a period of six to eight weeks. This did not include a work of Aelfric’s that he had already sent to Simonds because it was not among the volumes the university library possessed when he began. He could lend it because he later “recouered it once lost, or purloined” and returned “it to her mistris, the vniversity.”57 He added that he was on the verge of obtaining Trinity College’s manuscript copy of Aelfric’s grammar so that Simonds could borrow it.58 Simonds’s colloquy with Wheelock was not limited to Anglo-Saxon and other ancient languages. He must also have asked Wheelock’s opinion on a theological question with which, as we have seen, he was much preoccupied. The linguist’s answer must have been gratifying: “I am wholie of your iudgment . . . . I allow of noe bowinge before an image at all.”59 A week later, Wheelock expanded on the ceremonial matters that Simonds had himself been writing about, and it is possible that he had received a copy of the treatise on idolatry. Wheelock copied out six lines from one of “the ould sermons of the primatiue church of England” in Anglo-Saxon and Englished them for his new friend while acknowledging that Simonds could have read the original. They confirmed that before the time of Christ “Saturday was . . . called the Sabbath day” and that after “Christs suffringe” Sunday became “the christian men’s Sabboth day.”60 Furthermore, “the celebration of that day must be spiritual,” meaning free of unscriptural ceremonies of any kind. Wheelock admitted that, as a poor man in need of his position, he found himself acquiescing “not soe cherfullie” to certain ceremonies in Cambridge. He had found it necessary “to yeld as far I can in indifferent thinges,” and he hoped the time would come when they could talk face to face. At that time, “I shall open my heart vnto you.” He gave a strong hint of his views, however, when he added that the wrong people had “the vpper hand beyond the seas” and that “Castellio’s & Servetus, & Sosinus are aliue again,” although his preference was that “theire very names were buried.” Until then, it was difficult to be optimistic about an establishment of “the vniversal peace of the world called christian.” Wheelock closed his letter expressing gratitude that Simonds was writing “an Antidote” to those heretics and hoping that God would “assist you & give you, & all the worthies of Israel favor in his sight.”61 Wheelock was only one member of a circle of men Simonds knew who were deeply interested in Anglo-Saxon texts. On February 17, 1640, Si-

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monds wrote in Latin to Patrick Young, the king’s librarian at St. James Palace in London. He praised Young’s “excellent piety, joined with excellent learning,” and regretting that their meeting in London on January 29 had been so brief. He pronounced himself “sad and astonished” at the levying of soldiers against the Scots that was going forward. There would, alas, be many wicked men “skilled in stirring up trouble in the Church & commotions in the Imperium” while malice against “the pious and hatred towards the truth are held for virtues.” Although he found that his “public duties hateful to the Muses” were inhibiting his study of Anglo-Saxon, he nevertheless reminded the royal librarian that he had promised to lend to Simonds the Anglo-Saxon manuscripts that Young had lent to Johannes de Laet in Leiden as soon as the Dutchman returned them.62 The roles of de Laet and the antiquarian Henry Spelman are central to the Anglo-Saxon part of our story, as will be evident below. The very next day, hastily answering Commyn’s letter, Simonds said that he had just “accosted Patricius Junius with letters written, partly in Latin, partly in Anglo-Saxon.” In addition, he had spent the entire morning “writing to my choicest friend, Abraham Wheelock” about matters of antiquity. He then directly quoted what Wheelock had written a few weeks before about the Sunday Sabbath according to his Anglo-Saxon sources and enclosed some excerpts “from our ancient Anglo-Saxon homilies, the sermons of the Catholic Aelfric in MS in Camb. Univ.”63 Simonds was also in contact with the learned antiquarian William Dugdale. On February 27, Dugdale wrote that he was “in despaire to obteyne the bookes of Sir Thomas Cotton which you desire” and that he was “glad to heare of your inclinacion to print the Saxon Dictionarye & especially the english therwith.” He was grateful for the “peece of Saxon” Simonds had promised to send him, and Spelman had given him an Anglo-Saxon psalter.64 On March 13, Young replied that de Laet had written asking permission to “use the Anglo-Saxon books for a longer time.” Young felt that he could not reject this request because de Laet was “about to benefit the public good and the study of that language with an edition of a lexicon.” But he promised that Simonds would be sent the books as soon as de Laet returned them.65 De Laet (1581–1649) had studied under the great scholar Scaliger at Leiden, attended the Synod of Dort (where he sided with the Contra-Remonstrants), and then become wealthy as a director of the Dutch West India Company. De Laet, who had lived in England from 1603 to 1607, made visits there in 1638 and 1641 (when he met Simonds). Their lengthy Latin letters to each other continued until 1645. In the 1630s, de Laet published a series of books on geographical and botanical subjects, and his stay of several months in England in 1638 was devoted to his interest in Anglo-Saxon.66

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When Simonds next wrote to Young on April 1, he again discussed both public events and private studies. He said he knew that there were many who minimized “the strengths of the Scots” and were “promising easy victory” over them. But he thought Young had been right to express fear of “the destruction of both kingdoms . . . while Scotland is cudgeled, England will mourn.” He found examples not only from the ancient world (such as “the civil slaughter” under Galba, Otho, and Vitellius that had done more damage in Italy in “six months than by the foreign wars of many years),” but also the very recent horrors in Germany and France. Therefore he, like his friend at St. James, hoped that the Parliament would “persuade the king to peace and mildness.” Then scholars could “returne to their sweet studies,” and Simonds announced that he was “about to bring to light an Anglo-Saxon Latin Lexicon.” It would contain some twenty thousand words and combine the Anglo-Saxon researches of de Laet with Simonds’s work on the Dutch and German equivalents.67 This letter implied that de Laet had already agreed to this collaboration, but if so the Dutchman had not yet informed Sir Henry Spelman. In a letter Spelman wrote on April 17, the aged and famous antiquarian seemed just to have learned that Simonds planned to publish “a Saxon Dictionary which Mr Lait and my selfe haue bene longe about.” That had not been Sir Henry’s understanding when he borrowed John Joscelin’s manuscript collection of Anglo-Saxon words from Sir Thomas Cotton, had it copied, and lent the copy to Simonds with the understanding that it would be quickly returned so another copy could be made for Spelman’s use. Clearly, Spelman was nettled because he, despite the usual pleasantries, hinted that Simonds was a latecomer to the dictionary project who was trying to filch credit that belonged to his predecessors and perhaps even delay Spelman’s access to an important text. Spelman expressed confidence that de Laet was “the ablest man for this purpose” because of his excellent command of Anglo-Saxon and its similarity with “his owne language and the Frisian.” However, Spelman continued, “was I alwaies and still continue of your opinion that neither he nor any Foraner” should get the credit that belonged to Englishmen. Knowing how advanced de Laet’s labor was, he concluded by suggesting that the project would benefit greatly from Simonds’s assistance. Therefore “if it please you to adde your hony to a common hive I shalbe willing to ioyne with you” and de Laet in order to “make the worke of most perfection.”68 There can be no doubt that Simonds had written to de Laet in Leiden no later than April 14 and probably somewhat earlier suggesting a collaboration. On July 6, he responded to a letter from de Laet in which he said that the Dutchman’s response to the earlier letter reached him on July

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4. The delay, Simonds said, was because it had been put in the hands of Sir William Boswell in The Hague and that Boswell had failed to send it to him promptly. Joked Simonds, “he shall be rightly flogged on this account” because “he did not send more quickly such pledges of your affection for me.” At a minimum, de Laet must have shown interest in Simonds’s proposal because in this letter the Englishman included the “specimen . . . showing the series and structure of our Anglo-Saxon-Latin dictionary” that de Laet had asked for. Simonds said that he had decided to include the Dutch and German “dialects for the sake of your people and the Germans.” The specimen or sample was probably quite similar to the one in Sir Henry Spelman’s papers listing a dozen words with their definitions and equivalents in each language. It is in the hand of Simonds’s secretary except for the heading, which is in Simonds’s: “Dictionarum Saxo-Anglo-Latine-Anglico-Germano-Belgicum . . .” He also explained that he intended to preface the book with a substantial “prolegomena concerning the European language and nations, British and Anglo-Saxon historical material, the ancient Chronicles and Annals amongst us and other things . . . lest we should merely give a work full of words to the public.” It would draw “from the very autograph Archives and MS books” that he had spent the previous eighteen years studying in order to write “a most exact history of Great Britain” that would reveal “many new, marvelous and secret things given forth into the light, from the fountains of truth themselves.” For most of this period, however, “new quarrels and hatreds” concerning religion had so consumed Simonds that he was “in suspense whether it is safe to proceed or remain silent.”69 The prospect of combining forces with the Dutch polymath de Laet seems to have given him a burst of optimism about the possibility that he might at last publish at least some of the fruits of his many years of archival labor. If he wrote an answer to Spelman’s suggestion that he add his honey to the collective hive, it has not been found. In the event, no Anglo-Saxon dictionary reached print from any of these individuals or a group of them. Spelman died on October 1, 1641, his seventy-eighth year. On June 23, 1642, De Laet asked Simonds “no more to make mention of Anglo-Saxon things, or of the dictionary, for I really affirm I never thought of publication.” In any case, the book “still requires polishing, correcting and augmenting” for which he lacked sufficient time. He also professed himself “eager to put an end to these quarrels.”70 The honey remained in the hive. Another leading scholar of the history of the church in Anglo-Saxon Britain was James Ussher, the staunchly Calvinist archbishop of Armagh, and he was one of Simonds’s heroes. Simonds’s utter detestation of William Laud, Matthew Wren, Richard Corbet, and others of their ilk must not

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be understood as hostility to episcopacy itself. He distinguished sharply between “impious bishops” and praiseworthy men like Ussher, for whom he regularly used such adjectives as “honest,” “orthodox,” “pious,” and “learned.” He would repeat this distinction in a speech in the House of Commons on November 27, 1641: “some of the Bishopps weere of themselves soe corrupt and bad as they could not well be made worse, yet . . . they weere not all soe, this being but a personall crimination.”71 His good prelates also included James Montague, bishop of Winchester, whom he praised after his death in 1618 in these terms: “a godlie Bishopp & uerie orthodox, & had hee liued to our dayes the Church of England had been blessed in his integritie learning & courage.”72 He later made similar remarks about bishops Nicholas Felton of Ely and John King of London.73 He described Laud’s predecessor at Canterbury, George Abbot, as “an orthodox & learned diuine noe way infected with those anabaptisticall blasphemies latelie broached by James Arminius in the Lowcuntries.”74 Bishops like these he admired for their prowess as preachers and polemicists and their distaste for ceremonial novelties. Responding to a letter Ussher had written from Ireland on June 4, 1640, Simonds said that “amongst all those whose friendships I have embraced on account of their virtue and erudition, you easily hold the chief place.”75 Shortly after the Long Parliament opened, Simonds proudly told his wife that “I haue a most intimate & deare familiaritie with the Archbishop of Armagh; whome I haue promised to take lodgings close by him in the Couen Garden when God shall vouchsafe us the happines to bring us againe together, which I dailie pray for.”76 For Simonds, the legitimacy of the Church of England rested on its soteriology and its liturgy, not its form of church government. As we have seen, he believed that the history of Christianity in Britain consisted of a series of contests between good and bad bishops. This struggle had begun back in the time of Pelagius and Vortigern, and his own era was experiencing another round in the battle. Simonds had summarized this scenario in his first letter to Ussher, dated September 29, 1639. “When I cull the labours of kings, the things done in peace and war,” he wrote, “the purity of the Church under the Britons does not escape me,” nor did “the tricks of Vortigern himself” or “the ecclesiastical invasion of the realm by the Pelagians.” Their heresies and crimes were reborn in the sixteenth century in the Anabaptists, Socinians, Pseudo-Lutherans, and Arminians, and “from there, these tricksters have advanced to so great an audacity that they impudently lie in saying they tread in the footsteps of Luther, when Augustine himself scarcely drew his pen more forcefully against a servile will, on behalf of the grace of God, than did Luther.”77 Ussher did not respond to this letter from Simonds until February 1,

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1640. Simonds answered this “eagerly awaited” letter from Ireland immediately, although he feared Ussher’s “brevity . . . most appositely censured” his “prolixity.” He thanked the archbishop for “so much kindness” and the “sweet friendship of things literary” that he found comforting during “this fatal year” which was “ringing with the din of hostile levies.”78 By the time Simonds next wrote, on June 4, he and Anne were devastated by the death of little Adrian, the last of their five sons, and he began by saying that they had been “almost completely immersed in grief and laments for three days.” He had reread Ussher’s last letter from Ireland “with great emotion” and knew that the archbishop was coming to England. “Although I burn with desire to see and speak to you,” the shrievalty required him to stay in Suffolk. He therefore urged Ussher to reside at Stow Hall for a month in order to make use of the library for his own researches. Simonds added a small essay he had composed “concerning the holy estimation of Sunday among the ancient Anglo-Saxons” as well as “a few notes on worship and idolatry, to be corrected by you.” This was probably the small treatise on idolatry discussed in the preceding chapter.79 The letter with its enclosures reached Ussher in London, and his answer to Simonds on June 20 tried to offer “some present solace for some part of so great a sorrow.” Ussher explained that he had too many commitments at Oxford and Cambridge to accept the invitation to Stow Hall, but he expressed hope that they would be able to meet after Simonds’s term ended—as they eventually did. Ussher said that he had read “most avidly” the “meditations on worship” he had been sent and promised he would provide a copy of Nennius’s De excidio that he had compiled from various manuscripts because Simonds had complained that the one he had used in Cotton’s library was incomplete and difficult to read. Signing himself “James of Armagh, who is devotedly yours,” he asked that God would “be present” with Simonds and “bless” his efforts.80

The New Parliament On October 6, 1640, Simonds sent Ussher a draft of his “Prolegomena to our Anglo-Saxon dictionary, which is daily on the anvil.” He also asked for advice on problems with which he was grappling as he worked on the dictionary. For example, did “the fathers know the Hebrew language and letters before the flood” and “to which language in the world is the Irish language most related”? His next question confirmed that his attention to the news was as avid as ever. He expressed confidence that Ussher would agree that “the Jewish princes formerly and the present day Christian princes” were subject to law, for if not they were like popes or “Mohammedan emperors, who are without laws.” He concluded with his

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translation of the words of an Anglo-Saxon archbishop: “The King is he who rules his people temperately. If he oppresses them with violent rule, then he is a savage or a cruel abyss.”81 Although tied to Suffolk throughout the summer and autumn (except when called to Whitehall to be browbeaten by the Privy Council), Simonds continued to receive news from various sources. For example, Sir William Ellyott wrote on August 4 that the Lieutenant of the Tower of London had told him “many passages not knowne to many, but I dare not trust it with a Carryer, only in generall tis bad as euer.” The Turks had defeated some English naval vessels, but the Dutch under van Tromp had attacked the Turks successfully. In Surrey, “a great deal of Conduct money” had been collected and Ellyott had paid “both that & the shipp money lately.” Ellyott had heard, however, that the sheriff in his county “will come of[f] as ill as most,” perhaps a comfort to his beleaguered brother-in-law.82 Events in the north continued to occupy center stage. On August 7, Sir John Seton in London informed Simonds of a report that the Scots had “sent in the North a printed declaration of theire Intentions when they shall march with their Armie into England.” He added news of the moves of the prince of Orange and the Swedish army.83 John Johnson, the godly Londoner in Aldersgate with whom Simonds and Anne had lodged in 1639, also wrote on August 7 to thank Simonds for the notes he had sent on the fifteenth-century statute “concerning the vnlawfullnesse of our new oath” (meaning the hated “Etcetera Oath” that Laud and the bishops had passed through the convocation in May) which Johnson read as a requirement of acquiescence to the Laudian liturgical program. The oath required the swearer never to give his “consent to alter the government of this Church by archbishops, bishops, deans, and archdeacons, etc.” Many suspected that the “etcetera” referred to the pope. Johnson promised to “acquaint som godly freinds” with the way in which the oath was “like the dealinge of that pharisee . . . to binde heauie burdens vpon the minesters of Christe.” Johnson added that “it is saide the Souldiers haue no pay this week in the north” and that he would have sent “the petition of the Yorke shire gentrie” but had heard that Sir John Seton had already forwarded a copy.84 Johnson may well have been a member of a wide-ranging “godly” network, because back in January he had written to Simonds to recommend Sir Philip Parker and Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston for the Suffolk seats in the Short Parliament because “such men you know will stande for Christe and I know your harte is that way.”85 That Simonds had a reasonably accurate understanding of what was happening on the northern front is evident from the letter he wrote to de Laet on September 29, 1640. “Affairs amongst us have” come “to the point

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of extreme desperation,” and “the native liberty of the people and the purity of religion” were reaching “the crisis point.” When the Scots’ army crossed into Northumbria on August 28, “open war” began. On the river Tyne, near Newburn, the English army was put to flight, the king himself being “hardly six miles away.” On Sunday September 30, the Scots quickly entered Newcastle, “the most famous emporium of the whole of northern England” and seized the large royal arsenal there. On that day, “the Scottish pastors went to the pulpits of the temple and elicited tears from the assembly of those standing by, by their fervid prayers.” Although so far there had been little fighting because, Simonds wrote, “the Scots had behaved in a pacific way,” cavalry skirmishes had occurred and constituted “the forerunners of a true war.” He then turned—at considerable length—to literary matters, especially the Anglo-Saxon dictionary. The letter ends with the news, perhaps received after the writing began, that a truce had been agreed upon in the north and that a Parliament would be called. Thus, at the end of September, hope remained alive for negotiations that might uphold the “truth of religion, the imperium of the King, the liberty of the people and the lifting away and washing away of heresies and superstitions creeping in amongst us.” In addition, Simonds himself hoped to be freed from the threat of unjust punishment for failing to collect enough ship money.86 On October 13, 1640, Simonds wrote a Latin letter to James Traill in which he again stressed that he was hard at work on the dictionary and had sought advice from Ussher and others. He also mentioned that he had received the king’s sealed order for new elections to be held for a Parliament that would convene in November.87 As sheriff, he had to preside over the election of the shire knights for Suffolk. At least as early as October 1, however, he had started looking for a seat in the forthcoming Parliament for himself. On that day, he wrote to the earl of Pembroke about three matters. First, he urged the Lord Chamberlain to persuade the king to “abolish this new oath the Prelates haue sett foorth” and to “freely remitt all Arreares of shipp-mony” while relieving the sheriffs of the task of collecting it. He could do this without in the least undermining “any right his Maiestie supposeth hee hath to it.” To do these things “would not only bring much Honour & Glory to his Sacred person” but also “expedite the busines of the ensueing Parliament.” Second, he displayed his genealogical expertise by pointing out that Pembroke’s son could rightfully assume “the title of that great and ancient Baronie of Marmion” and thereby hold the title of “one of the ancientest Barons of the Kingdome.” If he did this, Simonds promised to send him the records that documented “the true antiquity of that braue and ancient Baronie.” Obviously hoping to

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have gained in the earl’s esteem by this offer, Simonds then introduced his third subject, which was to request Pembroke’s help in his quest for a seat in Parliament. At this point, Simonds assumed he could not represent a constituency in Suffolk because he was still serving as its sheriff. Thus he thought he needed to find a seat in a different county. “I know,” he wrote, that “ther will bee great vse of moderate Spirits this Parliament, of which number I hope your Lordship takes me to bee one.”88 Pembroke seems not to have responded to Simonds’s request, but on October 5 Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston wrote to say that “you may hould a Burgesses place” at Sudbury.89 Simonds’s accounts show several payments to Sudbury officials between October 24 and 31 and a payment of £5 to the town’s poor.90 On October 30, Sir Nathaniel wrote again to report that he was certain that “your ellection is good” at Sudbury and would be accepted by the House of Commons despite the fact that Simonds remained sheriff until his successor was named by the king. In other words, Barnardiston averred that the Sudbury seat was not only assured for Simonds, but that a legal challenge against him because of his office would fail. He advised Simonds, however, to seek his “discharg as speedely as may be after the new one be chosen,” since a sheriff could not leave the county for London until that was done.91 He wrote again on the same day to tell Simonds that Lady Maynard, the wife of Sir John Maynard who represented Surrey, thought the new Parliament was “like to sett vntill midsomer” but that her husband said it would last seven years. “I hope,” Sir Nathaniel added, that “we shall not now topp the branches, but stub vp the rootes of all our mischifes: which wilbe as the faster, so the shorter worke.”92 Word of Simonds’s success at Sudbury spread quickly. “I am verie glad that yow are chosen to be a burges of the house of Commons,” wrote Sir John Seton from London on October 31; “Wee heare for the most part honest & worthy men are pitched vpon.”93 Simonds remained apprehensive about his own election until December 8. On that day in the House of Commons, a report from the Committee of Privileges on charges of irregularity in the election of his partner from Sudbury, Sir Robert Crane, was presented. Having heard witnesses, the committee decided that Crane was “duly elected,” and Simonds’s notes recorded the House’s approval of Crane with the additional words in Latin and in cipher, “God providing, I am sure.”94 News of Simonds’s election was slower to reach Cambridge, but Wheelock’s November 2 letter shows that he had high hopes for it. “If your reverence is elected,” he urged, “use, I beg you, this gift, as though brought by God, for the glory of God and the Republic to be defended by all means possible. Regard, I beg you, our dear Britain, wounded on all sides

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by assassins and most wretchedly deceived.” Wheelock had heard that “among your Suffolk people . . . certain impolite animals (what if I should call them asses dressed in silk?) are envious of your Attic eloquence.” He offered a Greek adage to comfort his friend: “Let the donkeys kick, but it is not necessary for the philosophers to kick back.”95 Simonds, suddenly free of shrieval tasks, spent the rest of the month relishing the prospect of joining Sir Nathaniel and other friends in London in order to “stub vp the rootes of all our mischifes” by reforming both church and state. Replying to Wheelock on November 3, Simonds said he had received Wheelock’s “eagerly expected letters” the evening before and arose at about four in the morning to begin his answer. He told the linguist in Cambridge that “the impious bishops and the whole crowd of the heterodox” would hate him when he spoke out in Parliament and exposed “their εικουο δολείαν [ikon slavery] and their impious opinions against the grace of God, and their tyrannical rule, among other things, my conscience forcing me on.”96 the mp approaches his task The assembly that would become famous as the Long Parliament convened on Tuesday November 3, 1640, but Simonds D’Ewes was not yet present. That his delayed departure frustrated him is clear from his letter to Joachimi on November 13. He had hoped to communicate “by conversation and not by letter” the week before, but the king had failed to appoint a new sheriff as had been expected. “I am,” he wailed from Stow Hall, “bound to this single Caucasus as I am, the image of Prometheus.” He thanked Joachimi for the good news that the Danish ambassadors to Charles I had been urging him to make peace with the Scots. He had feared that since the Danes were “for the most part Lutherans and Pseudo-Lutherans” they would have instead “breathed out revenge” against the Scots, “the asserters of a purer confession.”97 On Tuesday, November 17, the first of what became a long series of parliamentary “fast days” occurred, and sermons by Cornelius Burges (in the morning) and Stephen Marshall (in the afternoon) were preached in St. Margaret’s Westminster. In his journal, Simonds mentioned that he was present when Marshall preached. Given what we know about his habits as a consumer of sermons, it seems likely that he rode in to London during the morning but not in time to hear Burges.98 After reaching London, Simonds wrote letters to his wife and to Wheelock from a borrowed chamber in the Middle Temple.99 He appears to have resided there until February or early March 1641. On April 27, he wrote to Anne from “Goates Alley a little beyond the white Lyon Taverne neare the Pallace yard.” His secretary, James Hornigold, wrote several letters to him from Stow Hall in July

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at “Mr Nesie his howse in Goates Alley neare the olde Pallace yard.”100 During his long service as an MP, he had several different lodging places near the Old Palace Yard just south of Westminster Abbey, the area that remained his principal base of operations. He was thus only few minutes’ walk from St. Stephen’s Chapel, the meeting place of the House of Commons. In his parliamentary journal, he more than once mentioned leaving the House of Commons to hurry home to find a document and then returning to cite it during the debate. For example, on April 1, 1642, he heard William Chedwell, a Cornish MP, refer to a precedent involving tax procedure from Edward III’s reign. He walked to his “lodging not far from the house” and located his notes about “the whole truth of the matter” and “returned speedily to the house.” He proceeded to demonstrate that the Cornishman had got it quite wrong and was “very faulty that he would presume to miscite a record so unseasonably.”101 But Simonds could also be found from time to time in Covent Garden. His brother Richard wrote a letter to him on March 15, 1641, and sent it to the “Green Dragon Inn, James Street, Couen Garden,” by which time Anne was with him on a visit from the country.102 No later than September 1642, he had taken “lodging in the Couen Garden at Mr Bevans house in Russell streete” because John Stuteville addressed a letter to him there.103 Numerous letters over the next several years were written to and from addresses in Covent Garden, and it seems likely that he actually had at any one time places to abide in both parts of town and that the Covent Garden accommodation was more spacious because it is clear that when his wife came from the country he lived with her there. On Thursday, November 19, Simonds recorded that he “took the oaths of allegiance and supremacy” and “so came first into the House this morning” in St. Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster. At that moment, his work as a member of the Long Parliament finally began. Later that morning, a fellow Middle Temple man, John Maynard, presented a report concerning a disputed election at Marlow in Buckinghamshire. Although the House confirmed the finding that it must be repeated because it had been conducted “secretly and illegally,” a question remained as to whether “the poor should have voice or no” in the election. Simonds spoke for the first time as an MP and argued, as he put it, that “the poorest man ought to have a voice, that it was the birthright of the subjects of England, and that all had voices in the election of knights.” He thus anticipated by more than seven years the famous assertion of the same sentiment by the Thomas Rainsborough in the Putney debates. Still later that day, Simonds spoke on a motion put by Oliver St. John “that the records in the King’s Bench of Attainders might be searched” in order to establish procedures

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for use in the forthcoming treason trial of the earl of Strafford. Simonds cited the Parliament roll for the forty-sixth year of the reign of Edward III to the effect “that every subject might have copies of any record though they [be] made against the King.” He was then appointed to a select committee that had been established the previous day to peruse the records of previous attainders in order to prepare for Strafford’s trial. The committee included eminent lawyers such as John Selden and Oliver St. John.104 Simonds’s first day as a member of the House of Commons had been a busy one, and he anticipated that the next one might be even busier. That evening, he hastily and excitedly composed the first of a series of letters to Anne, who was then at Ixworth Abbey with Lady Denton and Lady Stuteville. “My Dearest,” he said, “though ther bee a great busines I must speake vnto in the Howse of Commons too morrow if God permitt, and haue but this night to draw some heads to that purpose; yet I will not God willing faile yow. I spake thrice this morning in the howse.” He reported that in his second speech that day he had cited “a Recorde which not onlie gaue great satisfaction to the howse, but ended a waightie and perplexed dispute.” This was a statement mentioned above that triggered the addition of his name to the select committee. Moreover, he must have been delighted that he could relate that the House had ordered that, when the MPs received communion on the ensuing Sunday, “the Communion table shall bee brought into the Chancell, & not stand altarwise nor anie other innovation to bee used at & during the administration of the sacrament.” After completing this survey of a day’s work in the House of Commons, he turned to news of their friends he had seen and who had “all asked cordiallie for you,” listing the earl of Bath, Sir John Seton and his lady, and Ambassador Joachimi. “I pray keepe a chearfull spirit,” he concluded, “& walke close with God, to whose protection I now and alwaies commend you & our three daughters being all that are now left us.”105 Either he did not manage to prepare his remarks on “a great business” for presentation on November 20 or the opportunity to speak did not arise, because his only contribution on his second day as an MP was to support a motion made by Sir Henry Vane (the elder), the Treasurer of the Household, that only copies of records be brought from Ireland for investigation rather than originals as had been proposed initially. Simonds’s position is hardly surprising given his long experience with archival materials. Official records, he insisted, should “not be committed to the wind and the floods.” In particular, “if they should perish in the sea” on their way from Ireland, vital evidence against Strafford might be lost. Vane’s motion passed, a gratifying result for the novice—but well connected at least in “godly” circles—MP from Suffolk.106 On November 21, Simonds pledged £1,000 to-

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ward the total of £100,000 sought from MPs as surety for loan that would be devoted to the maintenance of the Scottish and English armies in the north.107 For the next nineteen months, Simonds threw himself into his work as a member of the Long Parliament with great energy and zeal. He was quick to speak about matters in which he was deeply interested and always keen to apply his vast knowledge of medieval statutes, precedents, and practices. The House ordinarily met six days each week, and recesses came infrequently. His long established habit of taking notes, initially of sermons and later from his reading and attendance at the law courts in Westminster Hall, asserted itself as he sat through the debates, conferences with the lords, and committee meetings. The massive record he compiled constituted the three large volumes that constitute his “journal” of the Long Parliament. It is by far the fullest record now extant of what went on, but it is very far from being the kind of stenographic record produced by court reporters in modern trials or transcripts based on recordings. Many of the entries are frustratingly telegraphic and provide little more than brief summaries of speeches and debates. His journal reports his own words and those of some other speakers in a given debate, but it is rare to find one that does not contain phrases such as “others spoke” or “divers spoke” in between the abbreviated versions of the speeches he did include. Like other members whose parliamentary journals survived, he usually took more extensive notes on things that deeply concerned him. Moreover, parliamentary proceedings moved in fits and starts because the making of decisions suffered numerous postponements when more urgent matters burst on to the scene. Business usually advanced in lurches rather than steady progress. Countless debates in the House of Commons were suspended when messengers arrived from the House of Lords with requests of one kind or another. Simonds occasionally inserted his own judgments about issues or his colleagues into his record. It is, however, usually easy enough to distinguish between such insertions and the account of the debates and proceedings that he provided. For example, he described the Hampshire MP and soldier George Goring as a “loose, profane man” and Anthony Nicoll, John Pym’s nephew and an MP from Cornwall, as “a black, tall, ignorant fellow,” black here meaning either dark-haired or of a swarthy complexion.108 Sometimes he put information about his own movements or thoughts in cipher, such as this comment on the afternoon session on July 1, 1642: “I seeing all matters tending to speedy destruction and confusion had no heart to take notes this afternoon.”109 Occasionally, we are given a view of St. Stephen’s Chapel and its acoustics: “I usually sat on the lowermost form close to the south end of

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the table on which the Clerk wrote, but having a little prepared myself to speak I went up, as upon Friday last, two steps higher that I might be the more easily heard of the whole House.”110 a walter mitty? John Morrill has raised an important question about Simonds D’Ewes’s speeches. When reading his journal alongside those of the other parliamentary diarists, it is difficult to avoid the impression that he frequently dominated the debate by making many speeches, some of them rather lengthy. Yet Morrill noticed that the speeches he represented himself as giving often went unmentioned by his fellow diarists. Explicit statements by others about his speeches are rare even on days when in his journal suggests he was up and down like a jack-in-the box. Morrill therefore suggested that many of the speeches he inserted in his journal were in fact not made and that we ought to think of him as a seventeenth-century Walter Mitty.111 From my point of view as a biographer concerned to chronicle Simonds’s thinking, it might not matter whether he actually gave all of the “set speeches” or the shorter extemporaneous remarks that are in his journals, since they provide insight into his attitudes about the subjects he addressed. I nevertheless am convinced and will argue that he did indeed deliver them in the House of Commons. There are three objections that must be made to Morrill’s idea that Simonds did not speak as frequently as his journal suggests. The first is that, as previously demonstrated, Simonds believed deeply that future generations ought to have reliable, accurate, original documents for study and reflection. That he would have cynically exempted himself from this guiding principle seems unlikely. He prepared at least one speech that he did not deliver and labeled it accordingly: “This was not spoaken.”112 He did occasionally insert his own private thoughts on things while making it clear to the reader that that was what he was doing. He was, in other words, quite capable of making his own commentary on events in the House of Commons without claiming to have presented it orally to his colleagues. Numerous examples of such insertions will be noted in what follows. Second, quite a few of his speeches were in fact mentioned by his fellow diarists. For example, Sir Thomas Peyton cited his November 23 speech on monopolies, and his November 26 speech on clerical authority over the laity was noted by Sir Framlingham Gawdy, John Moore, and Thomas Wise.113 When many were frustrated by the very lengthy answers the earl of Strafford was supplying to the charges against him and his obvious effort to drag out the process as long as possible, both Gawdy and Peyton took note of precedents D’Ewes had cited that might be used

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against Strafford’s tactic.114 Gawdy and Peyton also alluded to Simonds’s argument “that the deans and chapters are now useless so we may well dispose of the revenue they possess to better uses.”115 There were other occasions on which a speaker who came after him alluded to his statements. For example, when on June 8, 1641, the treaty with the Scots was being discussed, Comptroller Jermyn “appealed therein to the gentleman on the other side [Simonds] who knew the ancient records precedents better than himself.”116 During an important debate about the preamble to the bill for the abolition of episcopacy on June 11, 1641, when the House was sitting as a committee of the whole, Simonds spoke several times. According to Simonds, Oliver St. John, the Solicitor General, spoke admiringly of the way that “the learned gentleman who before spoke (for so he was pleased to style me)” had proven that “the present government of bishops . . . was not only opposite to the civil state of the kingdom but also in its own nature antimonarchical.”117 These two moments leave no doubt that Simonds enjoyed praise, but they also raise doubts about whether it is fair to make him a Walter Mitty. Vain he was. A shrinking violet he was not. The third and most important consideration is that if one applies Morrill’s razor to the planned speeches and extemporaneous statements by other prominent MPs, the result is the discrediting of numerous speeches by such powerful politicians as John Pym, Sir Walter Erle, John Glyn, Denzil Holles, and others that went altogether unmentioned by any diarist. The fact that Simonds’s journal is by far the most extensive creates something of an aural illusion about his prominence because he remembered and inserted numerous brief comments that he delivered off the cuff in response to other speeches, committee reports, and the like. Because they were his own, he remembered them more fully than he did similar kinds of interjections from others. It is therefore virtually certain that a great many speeches, especially the shorter ones, are altogether unavailable to us because none of the diarists took any notes on them—nor, indeed, considered them important. There were a good many days when Simonds was the only diarist from whom any notes have survived and many other days when he was one of only two or three.118 We therefore need to remind ourselves how likely it is that a great deal of what was said in the Long Parliament went wholly unrecorded.119 Morrill nicely demonstrated this point when he surveyed what we have of John Pym’s speeches. In the first three years of the Long Parliament, he found that Pym spoke “on at least 900 occasions” and that for “about 40 per cent” we know that he spoke but nothing of what he said. Moreover, “only on about 10 per cent of those occasions do we have a substantial account of what he said.”120 If we were to turn Morrill’s argument on its head

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and insist that no speech that went unnoticed by any of the other diarists be considered valid evidence for what was said or done in the House of Commons that day, our body of evidence would shrink catastrophically. Consider, for example, the many members who weighed in on February 8, 1641, on the subject of the Root and Branch Petition against the bishops. For February 8, Simonds provides a list of sixty MPs who spoke for or against sending the petition to a committee and thus initiating the legislative process. He said very little other than who was in favor of committal and who was not, but at least we have a valuable scorecard at the outset. Sir Thomas Peyton, the only other diarist active that day, provided very brief remarks on only two of the speeches (although one of them captured Edward Bagshaw’s witty remark that he was against “not episcopacy, but episcopapacy . . . i.e., that episcopacy which is grounded on papal principles”).121 On February 9, the discussion of committing the petition against episcopacy continued, and Simonds reported remarks from several others while giving the most space to two of his own speeches. Peyton, again the only other diarist, contributed almost nothing. Moreover, Simonds often took notes when the House was meeting as a Committee of the Whole more thoroughly than the others (and he also provides insights into committee meetings and conferences with the Lords frequently, quite unlike the other diarists). Since, as indicated, he often inserted his own comments made in these venues, the effect is undoubtedly to exaggerate his role as a percentage of the whole. Yet this was more the result of his note-taking zeal, energy, and methods than his ego (considerable though that was). Whether Simonds’s speeches were as admired or as effective as he would have liked at influencing decisions made in the House is, of course, unknowable. Occasionally, after his account of a planned speech or an extemporaneous one, he wrote things like “they all laughed” or “many cried well spoken.” Bruce took this as evidence that his vanity and ego made him a glutton for praise and attention.122 Doubtless Simonds enjoyed moments when others thought he spoke well, but the number of times he added such comments after the speeches of his own that he recorded is a tiny minority of the total. This lends credence to the proposition that when he mentioned that his remarks were praised, we can take him at his word. He did not know nor can we know how persuasive his colleagues found him, but that statement holds for most members of any legislature. The fact that many motions he introduced or supported by speaking did indeed pass does not mean that they would have failed in his absence. Yet if most MPs had a highly negative view of him, it is difficult to see why the enemies who attacked him so vehemently on the occasions which will be examined below would have bothered to do so. The greater likelihood

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is that they tried to intimidate him into silence because they correctly perceived that many members found his contributions—or at least some of them—worth considering. Wheelock reported to Simonds in a December 28 letter that John Lowry, MP for Cambridge, had been “narrating your praises on account of the innumerable examples produced by you from the literary monuments of the ancients.”123 an industrious mp It will be demonstrated in what follows that Simonds, although indubitably an assiduous notetaker, was also an active MP. He listened carefully, had a good memory, was capable of clever and pointed debating, made shrewd observations about people and issues, and had more of a tactical and strategic approach to achieving his agenda than has been perceived by historians. In addition, the notion that he was altogether humorless can be overstated. It is true that on July 19, 1641, he castigated Sir John Hotham and Sir John Clotworthy for proposing the drafting of a bill “for the gelding of priests and Jesuits.” This was followed by “much laughter so some called out that it might be ordered accordingly.” Simonds then said that he “was sorry to hear such motion as this made by those worthy gentlemen at the bar . . . when we have so many great businesses lying upon our hands and are so straitened for time.” But even he could not resist playing along by adding that “this custom was used amongst the heathens,” although both Herodotus and Tacitus condemned it as “a most wicked and unlawful action.” He was not the only diarist who implied that the joke had worn out its welcome. According to Moore, “Then was a long debate to have a bill drawn for the gelding of all popish priests.”124 On November 24, 1643, the House was considering a proposal from a committee that “the office of a controller” should be added to administration of the customs duties. Sir Walter Erle suggested “that the word ‘controller’” ought to be replaced by “some milder word.” Simonds responded that “controller” was plain and frequently used in the Exchequer records in its Latin form of contra-rotulator, so there was no reason not to use it. “But if we did not like the English term, we might use the word contra-rotulator . . . at which divers in the house laughed and Sir Walter Erle was half ashamed of his motion.”125 On another occasion, Simonds demonstrated that he could make a joke at his own expense. He urged his colleagues to oppose Pym’s motion to “compel the Londoners to lend money.” He reminded them of other instances in which people had hidden their money rather than lend under compulsion. In order to avoid “such a violent and unjust course,” he promised to sell his “whole estate, yea, even all but my books (at which

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the greater part of the house laughed).”126 After King Charles spoke in the House of Lords on July 5, 1641, to reaffirm his intention to assist the young Elector Palatine to regain his dominions, Simonds was one of several MPs to support this cause. He reminded the House of Commons that in the Parliament of 1624 much had been done for this purpose but that afterward “these heroic sparks were quenched, I believe by some episcopal holy water.”127 This sly dig at the Arminian clergy is likely to have produced considerable amusement. When Thomas Coke, an MP he described as “a young man and a man of hope,” was facing censure for misstating a precedent, Simonds rushed away to his lodging, tracked down the relevant record from Richard II’s reign, returned to the House, and showed that Coke’s mistake had been a relatively innocent one in that it opposed not the royal prerogative but the extravagance of the bishops and ladies of the court. Thus “the greatest censure” he thought appropriate was that “this gentleman . . . should cite no more Records till he have studied them better. At which divers of the house laughed.”128 Simonds worked in tandem with another note-taking MP, his friend John Moore from Liverpool, and when he missed a session or part of one he often drew upon Moore’s notes to round his out. At times Simonds also borrowed the notes of John Bodvel (or Bodvile), a member who represented Anglesey. He also cultivated good relations with the clerks and, like others, often consulted the record they were keeping of motions, bills, committee appointments, and other actions. Although he knew his journal was imperfect, he took pride in it. At one point early in March 1642, a declaration to the king was being debated, and Sir Walter Erle complained that some members were comparing their notes and that one of them had left the house. Erle feared that they might be revealing things to the king before the house approved them and moved that all notes should be turned in to the speaker. Secretary Vane went further and moved that note-taking should be altogether forbidden. MPs signified their desire to speak by standing up so that the speaker could see them and call upon whomever he chose. Vane’s proposal, Simonds wrote, “occasioned me to stand up, being the principal note-taker in the house, and say that . . . taking notes in this house is ancient even before [Vane] was born. I can make it good, for I have a journal taken by a member of this house” in 1572. The keeping of private journals by MPs had been, he insisted, their “ancient privilege . . . so to preserve the memory of things past to posterity.” Erle’s and Vane’s motions “were laid aside,” and the members returned to their discussion of the declaration.129 Although Simonds undoubtedly spent a great deal of time in the House of Commons capturing the words of other MPs, even he had lapses. For

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example, early in December 1640, while he sat writing a draft of a Latin letter to Abraham Wheelock, the lawyer Edward Bagshaw was speaking “sedulously but with a low voice” as he “fulminated against the new, recently introduced canons.” Thus, Simonds told Wheelock, his “ears [were] absent in their duty,” while his “hands and mind” were engaged in fulfilling “the duty owed to you.” He wrote of progress in the peace negotiations with the Scots, the flight of Secretary Windebanke and concern “that other evil councilors might slip away,” the impeachment of “heterodox and heretics” among the clergy, and the passage of a condemnation of the ship money tax as “unaccustomed and indefinite,” which occurred without a single “royal advocate or any other having spoken against it.” “I fear,” he continued, “lest Bagshaw makes an end of speaking before I finish writing.”130 Although he fully shared Bagshaw’s animosity toward the Etcetera Oath and the other canons passed by convocation earlier in the year, he obviously felt that the lawyer’s reasoning need not be recorded in detail. His journal entry on the speech is short and simple: “Mr. Bagshaw spoke long and concluded to damn all the new Canons and the wicked oath with them.”131 It must also be remembered that although his attendance was quite regular, it was not perfect. His practice was to rise very early and spend several hours writing or dictating letters and working to “perfect” his journal. Very often he arrived an hour or so after the speaker began the morning session. Less often, but nevertheless frequently, he left after an hour or two, took long dinners in the middle of the day, and sometimes spent afternoons in the pursuit of coins or manuscripts for his library or doing research for one of his writing projects. Work on the Anglo-Saxon dictionary continued intermittently until shortly before his death in 1650.

The MP: The First Six Weeks Three weeks passed before Simonds found time to write his second letter as an MP to his pregnant wife in Suffolk. On December 10, 1640, he started with an apology for its brevity. “My Deare Loue,” he began, if he could have found the time he would have written at length to her “concerning euerie daies passage” since his previous letter. “But that little I cann write to yow I must borrow from my sleepe; & wee haue had soe many great affaires handled in the howse of commons since I wrote last to you as would require a reasonable volume to sett them downe at large.” He related that, a week earlier, Secretary Windebanke had fled abroad. The MPs had “sent for him that morning” but were told “hee was ill in his bed.” Instead, he slipped out of London on his way to exile in France.132 This letter to Anne continued with the report that Simonds was

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a member of the committee established to receive the petitions of William Prynne and Henry Burton for redress of their sufferings at the hands of Archbishop Laud in the Court of Star Chamber. The committee met in the Star Chamber, and this was he believed an instance of “God’s wonderfull Prouidence; that wee should sitt in that Court wheere their bloudie sentences had passed against them, to judge those sentences.” No less strikingly, he was amazed to find himself sitting as “a Judge there, wheere I was latelie in possibilitie to haue been splitt & ruined” for failing to collect the ship money tax in Suffolk. Moreover, on the preceding Monday, “wee vtterlie damned Shipp-monie” and launched into examination of “those Sheriffs that haue been too busie in levying it.” As if that were not satisfying enough, both Lord Keeper Finch and the high court judges who had approved the legality of ship money were soon to face questions as well, and that dangerous man the earl of Strafford was imprisoned in the Tower under guard and “the doore of his bedd-chamber [was] locked vpon him each night on the outside.” He expressed concern that he had received no letters from Suffolk during the week but hoped it was merely a result of “the carriers negligence.” “I assure myselfe,” he said in closing, that “your midwife is with you: my dailie prayers are yow may haue a safe & happie houre.”133 Simonds wrote again only four days later to tell her about the “Root and Branch Petition,” the massive London document signed “with fifteene thousand hands, desiring . . . that the verie government by Archbishopps and Lord Bishopps in the church, with all ther ceremonies & Courts might bee abolished.” He enclosed a copy of Prynne’s petition along with that of Calvin Bruen, a Puritan who had been “greiuouslie vexed” for merely “visiting Mr Prinnne in his affliction,” and he gave Anne instructions that demonstrated his confidence in her: “You may lend them to whome you please with such other petitions & speeches as I shall send to yow, but I pray bee sure yow may receiue them againe to lay vpp for me; for they are the onlie copies I reserue for mine owne vse.”134 On December 5, Anne wrote of her pleasure in getting his letters with their “good newes and faire hopes for the happie successe of the Parliament. I wish that yow may finde as good success everie day after as yow did the first morning you went in.” She reported that she and their three daughters enjoyed good health, although “the too youngest haue not benn well since our remoovall to Ixworth.” Her greatest need was for “your companie . . . but I hope and pray that after a few months wee may meete againe with comforte and that in the meane time God may enable you to discharge your place in Parliament to his glorie and the publike good.”135 If Anne meant that she hoped the Parliament’s work would be com-

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pleted in the near future, she would be disappointed along with everyone else. However, during the first month of the Long Parliament, the MPs did begin to struggle with many—although by no means all—of the questions they would face, and Simonds’s first three letters to Anne mentioned many of them and particularly those in which he became deeply involved. As will be seen below, Simonds could be counted on to stand up and speak in defense of parliamentary privileges (especially the adjudication of disputed elections and freedom of speech for MPs) and for the punishment of the “evil counsellors” who had held office in the state or the church in the 1630s. These included great officers of state (such as Strafford, Windebanke, and Finch), judges, sheriffs, customs officials, and clergymen (such as Laud, Wren, and Cosin). In addition, he regularly and resolutely spoke in favor of the abolition of all the institutional means that had been employed to establish and enforce the Personal Rule (illegal taxation such as ship money and the unparliamentary collection of the customs duties), tyrannical courts such as Star Chamber and High Commission, and an episcopal hierarchy dominated by the wrong kind of churchmen. As the work continued, Simonds frequently interjected comments on these and other matters that some historians have described as “speeches.” Yet many of these were short and extemporaneous remarks rather than lengthy, prepared orations. On November 24, 1640, for example, he was among several members who commented on Sir John Hotham’s suggestion that the general in charge of the army in the north, the earl of Northumberland, be urged to remove the “popish officers” from his forces. Simonds endorsed Hotham’s resolution but argued that the king should be informed and his consent sought in this matter.136 Later that day Sir John Strangeways brought up ship money in listing several of his grievances, and Simonds asserted that “ship money was the greatest burden that ever this kingdom groaned under.” Still later he spoke briefly on the wording of an article in the charges being prepared against Strafford.137 The preoccupation with religious concerns that we have come to expect from Simonds expressed itself early in his years as an MP and would remain prominent until 1648. The puritan preacher Peter Smart’s petition against Dr. John Cosin, the ceremonially minded dean of Peterborough, had been delivered by Edward Bagshaw on November 10 and referred to a committee. Among other things, it alleged that Cosin had “publicly maintained” that Charles I was “not supreme head of the church in England, . . . for that he had no more power to meddle in ecclesiastical matters than the fellow that rubs his horse’s heels.”138 Eleven days later, Simonds spoke in favor of a motion to declare Cosin a delinquent because “the words he spoke” were worse than the treasonable remarks that had

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triggered the imprisonment at Tyburn of an MP named William Parry in 1585.139 When, on November 23, the MPs were sitting as a Committee of the Whole for Religion discussing allegations of idolatry against an Arminian cleric, Simonds interjected that “the Albigensians left their houses and estates” when the papists introduced image worship—“to worship images is devilish.” He was that day named to a subcommittee “to make an inquiry of the oppressions and sufferings of ministers” as a result of “ecclesiastical proceedings” against them.140 On November 26, Simonds joined Sir Miles Fleetwood, John Glyn, John White, and others in a prolonged attack on the Etcetera Oath, the new canons, and, more generally (as Glyn put it), the churchmen’s claim to use their “canons or constitutions” to “bind the subjects of England without their consent.” Simonds’s contribution was noticed by three other diarists that day: Framlingham Gawdy, Sir John Holland, and John Moore. According to Gawdy, the MP for Sudbury had cited a statute from Edward III’s reign that held that the churchmen in their convocations had “no power to make canons against law. That this oath is the first that ever was made with an ‘et cetera.’” Holland’s account is fuller and mentions that Simonds had found a declaration of the House of Commons in 1337 “that no man should be bound by the canons made in convocation.” Both Holland and Moore noted that Simonds had recalled from “Saxon times” the proverb that “the kings ride and the bishops preach.” He kept up the attack at every opportunity. On December 14, 1640, he ended a short speech as follows: “And so I desired we might put it to the question now for damning these new Canons and tomorrow dispute the craft of them that made them.” Eight months later, he would characterize the crime of the bishops in passing the new canons of 1640 as “a monster bred between Lambeth and Westminster, having indeed so many deformities in its shape as I know not with which to begin first.” It deserved a “very great and notorious punishment” which should include their exclusion from the House of Lords.141 It is important to recognize that Simonds was by no means the only MP who delighted in finding precedents, statutes, and other “monuments of antiquity” to back up arguments he presented in the House of Commons. The November 26 speeches of Fleetwood, Glyn, Chadwell, and Peard bristled with such citations as well, and the reader of the surviving journals encounters them at every turn in the speeches of many different MPs. On November 30, John Pym and Francis Rous introduced reports concerning godly clergymen who had been punished for refusing to read the Book of Sports by the Laudian authorities. Simonds agreed that that book had permitted “the profanation of the Lord’s day” and, according to John Moore, he also quoted an eight-hundred-year-old Saxon homily which said that

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“the Lord’s day” ought not to “be profaned with any liberty or sport, but kept with decent worship and to be celebrated with spiritual honors.”142 On December 19, he observed that in the Commons “there was much dispute about Bishop Wren and his wicked doings and great fears that he would fly away” like Windebanke. As the discussion of Wren’s “evil demeanors” continued, Simonds “showed that the course he took was radicitus evellere [to pull out by the roots] all religion and piety.” A very old person in Suffolk, he related, who “had lived in Queen Mary’s time” asked when Wren’s innovations began there whether she had “lived to see the old religion (meaning popery) restored again”? The MPs decided to ask the Lords to take steps to make sure Wren did not escape.143 He was forced to put up a bond of £10,000 on the same day and imprisoned in the Tower on December 30. Clearly, Simonds had meant what he wrote to Wheelock just before he left Suffolk that he planned to be a scourge to those addicted to “ikon slavery.” Toward the end of the morning session on December 11, one of the MPs for London, Alderman Isaac Penington, presented the famous Root and Branch Petition, which Simonds described in his journal as “a petition against the archbishops, bishops, deans, etc., and their tyrannical government which now [they] claim jure divino to the dishonor of God and the King.”144 Backed by the signatures of fifteen thousand Londoners, it sought the abolition of “the said government with all its dependences, roots and branches, . . . and all laws in their behalf made void.”145 Unless he omitted some speakers who came before him, Simonds was the third to speak about this petition, and he began by showing that similar petitions “against the oppressions of the clergy” had been delivered in Spain and France. Its principal request—the rooting out of episcopal church government—was something that had to be approached, he thought, “with great moderation” because “the government of the church of God by godly, zealous, and preaching bishops had been most ancient.” He revered “such a bishop,” but although “not a professed divine” he had “read somewhat in divinity” and was convinced that “if matters in religion had gone on but 20 years longer as they had done of late years there would not be . . . so much as the very face of religion” in Britain. Instead, the entire populace “should have been overwhelmed with idolatry, superstition, ignorance, profaneness, and heresy.” Despite his respect for “ancient and godly bishops,” Simonds identified the historical moment when a new and dangerous kind of bishop had emerged on the scene. It was when William the Conqueror began to give them “baronies and temporal honors and employments,” thus yielding to them not only distractions from their spiritual tasks but revenue that should “be restored

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again to the royal throne which now needed it.” The ranks of the clergy above them were the “cardinals, archbishops, and deans,” mere papal creations. To each archbishop at his installation the pope sent a pall (“a little short piece of woolen stuff”) that contained his authority. Yet “their employment in temporal affairs and offices” was diametrically opposed to “divers canons and counsels of their own.” As we shall see, Simonds would come to take an increasingly hard line against episcopacy in the months ahead, despite his attempt at this point to display the kind of cautious approach he had taken as sheriff toward the legality of ship money. The Laudian bishops had few defenders, but many MPs, as Simonds must have known, believed that there was danger in too radical a change. We should, he had said, imitate “the good husbandman” and “not cast away the wheat with the chaff but fan away the one and preserve the other.”146 Time and again, we will see him struggling to prevent the burning of any bridges that might enable king and Parliament to achieve a peaceful settlement of their differences. Despite the considerable attention he devoted to religious matters in the early weeks of the Long Parliament, Simonds also inserted his fingers into a large number of other pies as well. From the beginning, he was adamant that the treaty negotiations with the Scots proceed to a successful conclusion as quickly as possible and that they continue to receive the funds that had been promised to pay their troops in Newcastle at the end of the Second Bishops’ War. When some MPs suggested diverting some of the monies that had been borrowed to other purposes on November 28, Simonds opposed them. This was the first of many times that he would advocate keeping faith with the Scots and bringing the peace negotiations to a successful end. When, on December 4, what he called “a long and unnecessary dispute” arose about whether the truce should be extended and the talks continued for another month, he argued in favor of letting them proceed. He opined that “the orbs moved in this treaty like the celestial orbs with so much harmony as I should be very sorry they should receive any check here.”147 On the next day, he entered a different campaign. Sir Edward Coke, the great lawyer and Parliamentarian, had died in the Tower in 1634, and it was reported that three books he had written had never reached the hands of his son and heir. Simonds was appointed to a select committee to recover these and other books that had been seized by Secretary Windebanke. It was a task he took seriously, doubtless remembering what had happened to Sir Robert Cotton and his library, and on December 18, he argued in the House that “the search of papers was a greater injury than the imprisonment of the body.” Whereas a prisoner suffered in his “own person alone,” the seizure of papers might bring all

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his “friends and many petitioners . . . into danger.”148 On December 7, he attended the first meeting of the committee on forests which was to examine complaints arising from attempts during the Personal Rule to expand the boundaries of royal forests in order to fine anyone operating within them. At their next meeting, a week later, he heard that the earl of Warwick’s attempt to moderate the demands coming from the crown concerning Waltham Forest in Essex in 1635 had been rebuffed by the Lord Keeper, Sir John Finch. Knowing that Warwick was an experienced mariner, Finch had said: “My Lord you have been at sea and know if you have your enemy under the lock (that is under deck) you will hold him there, and so will we the country for the King.”149 This must have heightened the ire Simonds would later exhibit against Finch. Predictably enough, given his painful experience as a sheriff, he took a keen interest in the investigation of those sheriffs who had been overzealous collectors of ship money. On December 5, he was named to a committee charged with receiving petitions against former sheriffs accused of “the rigorous levying of ship money.” This committee was given power to demand records and papers and to send for and examine witnesses, and its first meeting began at 3 p.m. on December 11. The members learned that Thomas Coningsby, the sheriff of Hertfordshire in 1638, had employed servants named Prudden and Stow to distrain the goods of various residents of the town of Watford. These men, acting on a warrant from the sheriff, had carried out, Simonds wrote, “many notorious outrages.”150 Even more important to Simonds was the question of what to do about those who were guilty of convincing the king that he was entitled to ship money in the first place. Here the principal targets were those high court judges who had voted against Hampden in 1637. On December 7, Oliver St. John presented a report from the committee for ship money that had been created on November 20. It urged several resolutions that were passed without a single objection. They declared that ship money itself, the judges’ opinions concerning ship money, and that “the judgment in the Exchequer in Mr. Hampden’s case” holding him obligated to pay ship money were “against the laws of the realm, the subjects’ right of property, and contrary to former resolutions in Parliament and to the petition of right.” One MP whose remarks Simonds recorded “said he hoped this day should be the funeral day of ship money,” and these resolutions were among the actions Simonds had, as we have seen, praised in his first letter to his wife about his work at Westminster.151 In the same session on December 7, Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, gave what Simonds described “a notable speech against the judges for this judgment, and especially against the Lord Keeper, that he had been

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the solicitor and persuader to this business of ship money and that he should have the honor to be the first in the punishment.” Finch was a former MP and speaker of the House of Commons in 1628. King Charles appointed him chief justice of Common Pleas in 1634, and in 1635 he had tried to persuade his fellow judges to issue extrajudicial endorsements of the king’s right to collect the ship money tax. In 1637 he joined the narrow majority that rejected Hampden’s argument that the ship money tax was illegal. Finch joined the royal council in March 1639 and became lord keeper when Sir Thomas Coventry died in January 1640. He was advanced to the peerage as Baron Finch of Fordwich on April 7, 1640, and presided over the House of Lords in both the Short and Long parliaments. After Falkland’s speech, the House of Commons agreed that selected MPs should confer with the judges and ask them “what threats” Finch had used to achieve the favorable opinions of his colleagues. By the next day, the reports that were presented about these conferences revealed a vigorous lobbying effort on Finch’s part that included asking several of the judges with whom he had spoken to keep what he had told them about ship money secret. Pym’s motion that a committee “be appointed to draw a charge against the Lord Keeper” passed. A little later, Simonds spoke in support of Sir John Culpepper’s motion that “the habeas corpus business might be added to this charge” and that this point was “the root of all our miseries.”152 The committee’s work must have gone smoothly because on Saturday, December 19, Oliver St. John delivered what Simonds called “a long and excellent report” on the subject, and he spoke in support of St. John’s request that the charge against Finch be sent up to the House of Lords. In his remarks, Simonds recalled the case of judges in Edward I’s time charged by Parliament with extortion; some were executed and others fined and banished. In his view, Finch’s “offenses were transcendent both for the manner and the measure” in comparison with the earlier cases. “The very heathens,” he added, “were such haters of injustice as Cambyses, a Persian king, took the skin of an unjust judge, and had it bound about the pillars of the justice seat.”153 Next came what Simonds termed “a long and tedious dispute” about whether Finch should be tried for treason or “other crimes,” whether to honor Finch’s request to speak in the lower house before the vote was held, and whether if he were to speak would he “come in here—like others—to sit with his hat on, as once the Earl of Southampton did . . . or to stand bare-headed as other petitioners”? In 1614 Southampton had been one of three noble members of the Virginia Company who came to the House of Commons on colonial business. They entered “and stood bare within the bar” until Mr. Richard Martin, counsel for the company, began

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to speak, “and then by consent of the House the Speaker bade them be covered.”154 On Monday, December 21, the Commons acceded to Finch’s request that they listen to him, but the debate as to whether or not he would wear his hat or sit down was not quite finished. Simonds suggested a compromise as follows: “he ought to come within the bar but to stand and not to sit; for though he came not as an absolute delinquent yet he came as a petitioner and not as a clear man. . . . if he came as a peer to confer he ought to sit and sit covered.” After more discussion, they decided to provide a chair so he could sit if he wished. Finch then entered carrying “the purse with the Great Seal in it,” and he spoke standing but holding his hat in his hand. According to Simonds, Finch gave “a long and well composed speech” but one which he and many others “thought had rather aggravated than mitigated his crimes.” Simonds gave another clue to his own opinion when he wrote that George Peard “spoke exceeding well” when he said that Finch had been “a broker” in the ship money matter and committed high treason by upholding its “legality in his own circuit” and stating “that an act of Parliament could not cut it off.” The House then voted with “only two or three Noes” that he “was guilty of High Treason and other misdemeanors.”155 That afternoon, Simonds returned to the ship money committee and heard a long list of complaints against Sir Edward Baynton, the sheriff of Wiltshire in 1638. These included the claim that in one town he had collected no ship money from his own tenants and “laid the whole” on only four men. By a variety of extortionate devices, Baynton had extracted “a thousand pounds from the King’s subjects” in Wiltshire.156 Very early the next morning, Lord Keeper Finch fled to The Hague and did not return to England until 1660. Unwilling to allow the escape of the remaining judges who had ruled against Hampden to follow Finch’s example, Simonds moved that proceedings should begin against them. The Commons immediately sent a message to the Lords to require those judges to “put in good security to abide the judgment of the Parliament” because of the “examinations of crimes of a high nature against them in this House.”157 So far, in considering Simonds’s work as a member of the Long Parliament during the tumultuous first month and a half of its existence, we have attended primarily to the way in which he energetically pursued the two large bundles of grievances about which he had long been preoccupied: illegal taxation and religious doctrines and practices to which he objected. The two were closely related because so long as the king continued to collect “illegal” taxes successfully, he could ignore calls for a Parliament that would press him to reverse his religious policies. From laymen like Strafford and Finch, the king had received bad advice on the first

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front, and from clergymen like Laud and Wren, he had received wicked advice on the other. Simonds remained, as will be demonstrated in what follows, very much concerned about these matters while also engaging in other controversies. It is impossible to determine whether he was himself a driving force in the parliamentary decision-making process because we cannot know how persuasive his colleagues found him, but it is certain that he was an active participant in that process and that his deepest concerns were shared by a great many of his fellow MPs. The ensuing debate was about how best to achieve their goals, and that required defining them more precisely. It would yield no easy answers.

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7

The Long Parliament had commenced in an atmosphere of great expectations and high excitement. There must have been many members of both houses for whom its early months passed quickly in a whirl of frenetic and portentous activity. In this chapter, we will consider the period from late November 1640 until July 1642. Simonds wholly shared in the soaring hopes at the beginning, hopes neatly captured in his friend Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston’s desire that the MPs would not only “topp the branches, but stub vp the rootes of all our mischifes: which wilbe as the faster, so the shorter worke.”1 Yet by the end of this twenty-month period, Simonds’s private life and his public career would be shattered into pieces. We now turn to a more topical approach to his activities and interests as an MP up to the moment in January 1642 when King Charles’s decision to arrest five members of the Parliament dramatically increased the likelihood that civil war would ensue. Although taxation and religion remained at the heart of Simonds’s concerns, other matters presented themselves that he either could not or would not ignore.

The MP—December 1640–July 1641 parliamentary privileges We will begin with some of Simonds’s statements about the institution of Parliament itself, and particularly with its elections, procedures, and responsibilities. As indicated above, on his very first day in the House of Commons he had intervened in a discussion of a disputed election in Buckinghamshire. From Marlow, Peregrine Hoby and John Borlase were returned, but an undersheriff there had hidden the warrant for the election and conducted it with his “accomplices . . . secretly and illegally.” This was the finding the of committee of privileges as reported by its chairman, John Maynard. The committee recommended that the election should be voided, and this was done on November 19 and a new elec-

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tion ordered. Besides Simonds, two of the other diarists mentioned the Marlow election only to record the House’s decision and to add that the undersheriff’s skullduggery had prevented the townsmen from receiving the notice they should have had of the election. Only Simonds’s journal mentions that a question then arose about “whether the poor should have voice or no,” and as indicated in the preceding chapter he regarded this as a matter of their “birthright” as Englishmen. He then listed eleven MPs who spoke, he being the second, and stated that he spoke in favor of the wider franchise. Although six speakers agreed with him and four did not, nothing further came of this motion.2 Another election case attracted his interest on December 11, 1640, because of a dispute about the electorate at Tewkesbury. His view was that all the residents ought “to have voice though never so poor.” If the royal letters patent could “restrain the choice” of a burgess “to two or three, then actum est de comitiis [it is all over with elections]” because only those chosen “by great men” would prevail. What he described as “a long and needless dispute” over this question led to the creation of a select committee that was “to draw a bill to prevent difference in elections for the time to come.” He was also named to this committee.3 On February 4, 1641, John Selden pointed out that the town of Seaford on the Sussex coast had sent burgesses to the House of Commons in Edward I’s reign “and twice after.” Maynard joined Selden’s call for election writs to be sent to the town again. Sir Walter Erle objected because “the inhabitants were rude and some of them papists, and the lord of the town a papist.” Simonds, however, insisted that neither the manners of the residents nor their religion was relevant; rather, the key was “the ancient birthright of the subjects of England.” To take away a right they had held since 1278, even if rarely exercised, was a “hard measure,” and he thought that it should be restored to them. The next speaker was John Hampden, who said that although he first agreed with Maynard, Simonds’s argument had convinced him, and the House agreed.4 On March 30, 1641, the committee that had been set up to propose election law reform sent a bill for its second reading. Although he “liked the bill well,” Simonds argued that it needed improvement. He agreed with the bill’s exclusion of almsmen from the franchise, but he wanted it to specify “that no more monopolizing elections might be in cities and boroughs but that all men residents there might have voices.” He also pointed to an obvious anomaly that needed statutory correction. A 1548 statute required that burgesses be resident in the towns they represented, but everyone knew that boroughs usually chose members of the gentry rather than their own citizens. This “constant practice for so many years have made them unquestionable, yet it were better that they were warranted by a law.”5

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When Maynard reported on the disputed election in Salisbury on March 3, 1641, Simonds remarked that the two MPs had been chosen by the mayor and a limited circle of citizens, whereas two other men had been “elected by the whole number of the other citizens.” Although he knew and respected the first pair of men and had never so much as heard the names of the other pair, he believed that the “election by the mayor and a few others was absolutely void and against the hereditary right of the subjects of England.” He cited a statute of 1444 the wording of which affirmed “the common law, which is the same in towns as in the counties, where anciently all freeholders had voices.” The debate ended in a division that involved an interesting aspect of parliamentary procedure which Simonds would repeatedly mention on future occasions. What he called “the constant rule in Queen Elizabeth’s time” was that the supporters of a motion that called for an “innovation” left the chamber, and the tellers for the affirmative counted them as they walked out. Those who opposed the novelty remained in their places and were counted by the tellers for the Noes. A dispute followed over “who should go out, the affirmatives or the negatives.” In this case, the Speaker ruled that it should be the negatives, but Simonds and others objected because “we who said No stood for the statute law and common law of the realm and would not have had an innovation.” Finally, however, his side yielded and agreed to go out rather than that “the great business of the kingdom should miscarry by any further contention.” Some 216 members voted to let the election stand and 133 to void it. Had the negatives carried the day, it would have meant the disabling of Michael Oldisworth, the earl of Pembroke’s secretary, and Simonds suspected that many of the Ayes “gave their voices out of affection” for him. Despite his acquaintance with Oldisworth and Pembroke, Simonds “was exceedingly troubled” by the outcome because he found “no color of justice or law to be carried by so great a number of voices against the vote of the religious and sound men of the House.”6 The same rule about which side should leave the chamber in a division had attracted Simonds’s attention just two days earlier, when the House had what he labeled “a long dispute” about the punishment of a clergyman who had in a sermon preached in Salisbury in 1634 prayed that “‘from lay puritans and lay Parliaments good Lord deliver us.” The preacher was Dr. Thomas Chaffin, a man Simonds had frequently heard and thought well of during his time at the Middle Temple. Ever the enemy of clerical invasions of the laity’s sphere and despite their former friendship, he found Chaffin’s words highly offensive and thought he should be imprisoned in the Tower. But he suspected that the supporters of such a

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harsh punishment would lose in a division because many would remain “within rather than they would lose their places,” meaning their seats in a crowded chamber. Simonds therefore suggested that Chaffin be “sharply reproved at the bar” and required to preach a recantation sermon at Salisbury, and this motion passed.7 There was nevertheless a division about whether Chaffin should go to the Tower. Conrad Russell proclaimed it “the first party division” of the Long Parliament, and Chaffin survived it “by 190 to 189, in what remained the largest division in the Parliament.” In a footnote, Russell added that the clergyman likely benefited from “the fact that he was a former chaplain to Pembroke.”8 What this meant about Simonds’s relationship with Pembroke, whose patronage he had enjoyed in the 1630s, is an interesting question. A different threat to the legitimacy of an election emerged in Maynard’s report from the committee of privileges on December 16 about Sir Edward Bishop of Bramber in Sussex. He was found to have paid a bribe of £10 for votes, and the committee recommended that he be disabled from membership in the Parliament. The House agreed to do that, but someone moved that he also be “sent for as a delinquent” for this offense. Simonds disagreed, saying that the loss of his place as an MP “was sufficient punishment for his buying of wind and breath.”9 Another problem was that of the status of men whose disputed elections had been ruled good by the committee of privileges but not yet voted upon in the House itself. Denzil Holles moved that two such men should be allowed to take their places on June 11, 1641, but Simonds demurred. He thought it was “a fundamental rule and order of this House” that in cases in which elections were in doubt, no one could sit until he was “duly elected.” Since there had already been cases in which the committee’s recommendation was rejected, he argued for observance of “the ancient orders of the House” and allow admission to it only after the House had acted.10 Simonds’s insistence on maintaining what he considered “the Justice and honor of the House” emerged again when a motion to seat William Dearlove for Knaresborough in Yorkshire was discussed on December 7, 1641. Henry Benson, Dearlove’s predecessor and father-in-law, had been disabled for corruption, but, as Simonds pointed out, it was unquestionable that the sheriff’s return showed that Dearlove “was legally elected and had the plurality of voices.” The House ended up agreeing that Dearlove had to be seated, after which, as Simonds reminded them, if “we find him not fit to be continued” he could be disabled.11 On March 19, 1642, however, it was agreed that although Dearlove had, according to Sir Gilbert Gerard’s motion, received the “greater number of voices . . . his said voices were unduly procured and himself held unfit and unworthy.” Dearlove’s career

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as an MP was brief and inglorious, but Simonds presumably felt some satisfaction that the distasteful matter had been handled according to “the ancient orders of the House.” At this point, some of the friends of Sir William Constable, the former sheriff of Yorkshire, moved that he be placed in the now vacant seat because he had originally sought it against Dearlove. Simonds responded that although he would have been delighted to have Sir William Constable in the House, he could not support a violation “against law and justice out of respect to any man whatsoever.” Constable could be admitted only after “a new election” because to admit him without it flatly opposed a 1436 statute that a member could not be received after an election in which he had fewer votes than the winner. The attempt to insert Constable went no further.12 Members of Parliament expected to have the privilege of free speech during parliamentary sessions, and the king was not supposed to arrest them for anything they said during debates. However, he sometimes imprisoned or otherwise punished members after a Parliament ended and had done so to Sir John Eliot, Denzil Holles, William Strode, and others after the chaotic close of the 1629 session and to John Pym, John Hampden, Sir Walter Erle, and others after the Short Parliament in May 1640. Simonds welcomed Nathaniel Fiennes’s motion on December 18, 1640, for a select committee to inquire into “the breaches of the privileges of Parliament” on these occasions. On February 23, 1641, the committee was enlarged substantially, and Simonds was one of the new members of it. 13 In his opinion, when the speaker recognized a member of the House of Commons, that man could speak his mind openly and at whatever length he felt necessary. He had on January 19, 1641, cited an “old verse” from the “ancient record of the Black Book of the King’s Household, Libera gens cui libera mens et libera lingua” (“A free people is one who has a free mind and a free tongue”). He took this to describe “the freedom of speech incident to the members of this House.”14 Simonds repeatedly supported the privilege of freedom of speech. For example, early in 1642 a speech by Sir John Northcote “was so interrupted as he was fain to give over before he had intended.” Northcote was speaking against a motion to require the marquis of Hertford, the governor of the king’s heir, “to take the young prince into his custody.” Northcote feared that the effect would be to “increase the jealousies between the king and us.” Simonds, “in respect of the orders of the house, which had been so extremely broken,” reminded his colleagues that “it is lawful for every man, when it comes to be put to the question” to “freely speak against it, and therefore we were better to hear one another now with patience” in order to come a decision more quickly.15 As we shall see, Simonds frequently sought to reduce the ten-

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sions between the Parliament and the king, and we here see him exploiting procedural reasons to pursue his political purpose. This did not mean, as even Simonds acknowledged, that there were no limits at all upon the language an MP might use. When someone went too far, the House would be justified in cutting him short and even in calling him to the bar and subjecting him to censure. On December 14, 1640, Serjeant Wilde “spoke long to little purpose” in defense of a deputy lieutenant accused in a petition from Worcestershire of “horrible oppressions . . . and taking bribes.” Various members interrupted Wilde, but he persisted. Simonds, supported by Sir Walter Erle, moved that “though every member ought to have free liberty of speech yet if any upon hearing spoke impertinently, as the gentleman now did, it was ever in the power of the House to desire them to forbear.”16 There was, in other words, an orderly way to proceed in such situations so that the House could pursue necessary business.17 As Chris Kyle has demonstrated, the MPs had a number of weapons at their disposal, including laughing, coughing, hawking, hissing, and shuffling their feet, to bring an end to speeches they disliked.18 On Easter Monday (April 26), 1641, the discussion concerned the treaty then being negotiated with the Scots. Gervase Holles, who represented Great Grimsby in Lincolnshire, delivered a speech in which he began by admitting that he intended to “take the liberty with your favors to deliver myself freely. I have a blunt way in speaking my heart, . . . but it is a folly I love so well I will not part with it.” He went on to assert that the propositions put forward by the Scottish ambassadors included demands so excessive that “they may well be our younger brother Scotland, but like Jacob, they seem to me as if they had an aim to supplant us and take away our birthright.” Since in his view the Scots had expanded “their demands beyond all proportion,” to accept them would “require things unfit for a King to grant, and dishonorable for this nation to suffer.”19 Simonds rose to defend “a liberty of speech” because without “a free declaration of our opinions” it was impossible that “truth be known.” Nevertheless, he continued, “we must not turn liberty into licentia,” liberty and license being quite different. He then made an interesting distinction between “rash and sudden speeches” that should always be “subject to pardon” and “set speeches” for which the bar was higher. The latter he defined as “not only like a dean’s ruff that is starched and grand but like an Italian’s beard, . . . and fit to be printed.” In other words, a speech that had been carefully prepared in advance should be held to a higher standard, a standard that Holles’s “dangerous and scandalous speech” did not reach. The king himself and the House of Lords had already approved some parts of the proposed treaty, and Holles had therefore insulted them. Exercising his own debating agility, Simonds

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said that Holles had “made the Scots Jacob who was blessed and we Esau who was cursed; this a wrong to us but I hoped that we were both Jacobs; blessed nations both.” Holles had given a “set speech” which began by saying he knew he “would displease us” and yet he persevered because he was “so much in love with this child of his brain” that he would not stop even though it ought to have had “the brains dashed out as soon as it is born.” It therefore deserved the “highest censure this House” had in such cases: “calling to the bar and sending to the Tower.” A “long debate” followed during which Holles waited in the Committee Chamber. When he was called back in, he was required to kneel outside the bar and listen to Speaker Lenthall tell him that the House had taken “great offense” and that he was “suspended from coming into this House.”20 Yet at heated moments in debates, MPs continued to interrupt others and sometimes to be so angry that they accused others of uttering offensive words that called for punishment. An example occurred on February 9, 1641, when an argument about the abolition of episcopacy erupted. Sir John Strangeways had opposed abolition on the ground that “if we made a parity in the Church we must at last come to a parity in the commonwealth.” Oliver Cromwell then objected that “he knew no reason of those suppositions and inferences” that Strangeways had just uttered. “Upon this divers interrupted him and called him to the bar,” wrote Simonds, meaning that Cromwell was being told to leave his place and explain himself at the bar beyond which nonmembers of the House were required to stand and answer questions. John Pym and Denzil Holles then claimed that “the orders of the House” held that anyone who “said anything that might offend” could “explain himself at his place” rather than at the bar. Simonds then interjected that he had “been often ready to speak against the frequent calling men to the bar in this House upon trivial occasions. For to call a member to the bar here is the highest and most censure we can exercise within these walls.” This was because “it is a rending away apart from our body. . . . once a member amongst us is placed at yonder bar . . . he ceases to be a member.” It was similar to excommunication as practiced in the early Christian church and was then “greatly feared but being used upon every trivial occasion is now grown contemptible.” In his study of Elizabeth’s parliaments, he discovered that only three MPs had been so treated, and in two of those cases, the offender was then ordered to the Tower. In the third Elizabethan case “when one man took exception at another,” the House did not allow it, and Simonds moved “that if any man hereafter should without just cause call another to the bar” he should be required to pay a fine. The clerk put it this way in the Commons Journal: “a good fine might be set upon his head.”21

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Until 1641, the duration of a Parliament, like its initial summons, had been entirely up to the reigning monarch. However, on December 24, 1640, William Strode moved a bill that would require, if a king let three years pass without issuing writs for a Parliament, a Parliament should be called without them. In his journal, Simonds wrote that he “misliked” the bill but chose not to speak until the second reading. On December 30, Oliver Cromwell, speaking for the first recorded time in the Long Parliament, moved for a second reading of the bill, and various members supported his motion before Simonds responded. He conceded that annual parliaments were desired by “all that wished well to the public” and cited a statute from Edward III’s reign that said that there should indeed be annual sessions of Parliament “for the redress of mischiefs and grievances that daily happened.” Edward III, he opined, “was one of the most excellent princes that ever this kingdom had.” Simonds also maintained that “in elder times” parliaments had often met twice a year. Certainly, he continued, “the lamentable effects of the want of a Parliament” in the 1630s were evident to all. Up to here, Strode, Cromwell, and other advocates of the bill must have been quite pleased at what they were hearing. Next, however, Simonds pronounced that “we should not provide a remedy worse than the disease.” For one thing, there was danger of offending the king because although “the fundamental right of the subject” required protection, the MPs should recall that the “fundamental rights of the crown . . . were to be preserved as well.” Although he fervently hoped that there would be frequent parliaments, the bill as written was deeply flawed. It specified, for example, that if the sheriffs and borough corporations did not choose MPs, “then the freemen shall.” With no authority named “to take care of the poll, we might have here returned 4,000 knights, citizens, and burgesses instead of 400.” Moreover, the bill stated that the session would last for forty days, a period not nearly long enough to resolve the elections disputes that would be unavoidable. Another problem was that the bill said nothing about prorogations, and he reminded his colleagues that Elizabeth’s 1572 Parliament “continued for about nine years” as a result of prorogations. A king could extend “Parliament 20 years together by several prorogations,” thus in effect nullifying the bill’s purpose.22 Simonds concluded his speech by moving for the drawing of a new bill for annual parliaments that would have provisions to address these flaws. “Many cried well spoken; and Sir John Wray seconded my motion.” Yet such was the enthusiasm in the House that the bill passed its second reading.23 He wrote to Anne on January 21, 1641, and included a copy of Strode’s bill and his own speech against it “soe farre as I could recall it from memorie.” “Ther was not a man of the howse,” he claimed, “that did

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oppose against it with soe much freedome of speech as I did.” He told her that he had spoken “almost vpon the sudden” against it because he feared that “this fatall bill alone may if God preuent not ruine & blast all our happie proceedings.” “Fatall” is a word that he came to use frequently in his speeches and letters, and by it he meant that this or that bill or policy had dangerous consequences that would block progress toward the most important objectives of the Parliament as he conceived them. In this case, he accepted the validity of the bill’s goal of ensuring frequent parliaments. But he also thought that king’s anger against it meant not only that he would not sign it but also that it would obstruct agreement that might be achieved between king and Parliament on other vital issues. Simonds’s concern had subsequently been confirmed in talks he had with Sir Henry Mildmay, a royal official, and Henry Percy, the earl of Northumberland’s brother. Mildmay related that the king was “extreamelie troubled” at this bill, and Percy said that he had heard Charles vow that “hee would neuer pass this bill whilest hee had life.”24 That the king reversed himself under heavy pressure and signed a revised version of it on February 16 did not mean that his fundamental view had changed. On the contrary, as Richard Cust has pointed out, “behind the scenes” Charles was saying that the Triennial Act would “strike such a blow against royal authority” that it would also lead to a rebellion that would overthrow both the Crown and the nobility and make England a democracy.25 taxation If questions arising out of the privileges, procedures, and duration of Parliament tended to extend their tentacles in various directions, the same was true of taxation. Most of the members of the Long Parliament began united against the collection of what most considered illegal taxes such as ship money, impositions, and the customs duties that had lacked parliamentary approval since 1626. At one point, Simonds wrote in his journal that a speech he had given on “the bill of tonnage and poundage” had the approbation of everyone present “excepting the courtiers and some few besides.”26 Yet the members nevertheless recognized that the government needed revenue for all sorts of legitimate purposes, and the problem was how to reform the system of taxation so as to make it once again legal, sufficient, and equitable. The military success of the Covenanters in Scotland had finally forced the king’s hand since only a Parliament could supply the money needed to sustain the Scottish army in Newcastle and his own army in position between the Scots and London. An essential task for the Parliament, clearly, was to pay those officers and soldiers until a treaty could be concluded and they could be sent home. Simonds merely

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stated what his colleagues knew in a speech he made on April 27, 1641: “It is true money is the great wheel upon which all the rest will move . . . . Without money there is no disbanding of the armies.”27 Moreover, if they were unpaid they would be forced to seize what they needed to survive, and their pillaging would inflame the north. On November 19, 1640, his first day on the job at Westminster, the committee appointed earlier to recommend “some course for supply of the king’s army and relief of the northern parts” made its report. It called for a levy of £100,000 with each county contributing “according to the rates of the last subsidy paid by the county.”28 Familiar as he was from his shrieval experience with the disputes that arose out of rating people, he disliked subsidies but knew they were inescapable in the near term. On December 29, the subject of the debate was again the king’s revenue, but a roadblock quickly reared up when the official sent to present the royal accounts could bring in only the totals for 1635. At that point, the annual receipts added up to £618,379 and expenses to £636,536. In cipher, Simonds wrote that he stopped taking notes at that point because he thought the numbers “were exceedingly falsely set down,” with some of them “not the tenth part set down.” When information about the current balance was requested, the answer was that it would take two months to prepare. Treasurer Vane then said that he thought “a balance for the main and greatest sums might be prepared within 8 days” and that the deficit was much greater than ever before.29 Another obvious problem was the financing of the navy without which an island nation was not safe. Simonds’s historical researches convinced him that the solution lay in the customs duties. He had agreed with Solicitor St. John’s statement back on December 14 that since ship money, monopolies, and other sources of revenue had been or would be taken away from the king, others would have to be found. Simonds, speaking after St. John, said that he “well knew what means the kings of England anciently used to repair their revenue.” One was “the sea itself,” by which he meant the customs duties. He concluded that he thought that “we should show as much regard to his Majesty as ever loyal and loving subjects did to any king of England.”30 When, on March 17, 1641, the House heard a report that showed that “there was a present necessity of setting out 20 ships” that would require £85,000, Simonds produced evidence from the reigns of Edward I and Edward III to show that English kings had long kept up “the guard of the seas” with “their customs” and the vessels that coastal towns could supply. Given that King Charles had collected both the customs duties of tonnage and poundage and ship money illegally, Simonds found it difficult to understand why “the fleet should be now unprovided

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for.” Yet, he continued, if more money was essential for this purpose, the only safe way to raise it was by way of taxing imports and exports. He proposed that a committee be named to write such a bill and suggested it might “yield more in a legal way than it did being taken without law.”31 Simonds’s careful watch over anything to do with the raising of revenue for the government was partly driven by his desire that Anglo-Scottish relations remain good. The lengthy negotiations with the Scots included their demand for reparations and the extension of the truce. These subjects came up for more discussion on January 21, 1641, and various MPs weighed in. Several suggested deferring these issues to some future date. Simonds demurred and spoke for swift action. Either “we must let the treaty of peace continue and pay the two armies for many months, or else fall anew upon the late intestine broils, the worst of all evils.” Considering the horrors that would follow upon renewed warfare, he urged “that we should fall readily and cheerfully upon the third way,” which was as “friends and brethren” of the Scots we should “support a part of their charges and losses” during and after the Second Bishops’ War.32 On February 1, the House disputed whether to take up the ministers’ petition against oppressive bishops or Scots’ reparations. Simonds argued that both subjects “were of great moment” but the latter more urgent. He compared them “to two houses a man had standing together,” one of which was in flames and the other “an old rotten house fit to be pulled down.” The problem of “the Scots’ demands and the northern parts is like the house on fire, which we should first quench.” The more complicated business of church government could wait a bit.33 When some MPs suggested “that we should declare the Scots enemies” on April 6, Simonds advised against making peace because most of them “are descended . . . from the same stock and root that we are.”34 On May 17, he spoke against Edward Hyde’s motion to “slight the Scottish nation.” Because Simonds considered the Scots “so brotherly, so friendly, and so potent a nation,” he moved “that this House does approve the piety and affection of the Scots in wishing us a conformity of church government with them.” He was then pleased that “all the honest men of the House generally approved my motion,” but some others disliked his use of the word “potent” to describe the Scots. He answered them by explaining that he had “reserved the comparative and superlative potentior [more potent] and potentissima [most potent] for the English nation.”35 Even his Scotophilia had limits. He balked at the ninth article of the proposed peace treaty in which “the Scots desired an union with us and a capability of honors, offices, inheritances, and all things else in England as natives.” This was an attempt to revive James I’s ill-fated scheme of union in his first Parliament, and Simonds

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agreed with that body’s conclusion that it was “unsafe to yield to them.”36 By 1645 he had changed his mind about the desirability of conformity with the Scots in church government, as we shall see. But in 1641 they formed a crucial part of the bulwark against a resurgence of Laudianism, and he appreciated them for it. the earl of strafford There was no more controversial issue facing the Parliament in the spring of 1641 than the question of what to do about Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford. On his very first day as an MP back in November, Simonds had, as indicated above, provided a helpful precedent for the campaign against Strafford. Speaking on February 20, he denounced Strafford as “the blackest delinquent that ever appeared at the bar of justice in this kingdom,” and he produced still more precedents later in the month during the procedural infighting that preceded the trial.37 On February 25, the MPs heard Strafford’s written answers to the charges against him, and Simonds was the first to speak the next morning about those answers. They greatly disappointed him because he had been expecting to see “that great and vast depth of wit and judgment that was generally conceived to be in him.” Instead, most of what Strafford offered “was very weak and invalid.” In some particulars, he had merely denied the sworn evidence of many witnesses without any evidence to support his denial, and in others he claimed he “did not remember certain words he spoke” that had been quoted against him. He also employed “that old shift, . . . the common excuse of delinquents, his sovereign’s command” when it was well known that men like him “first advise the prince what to do, and then obtain themselves his command for the doing of it.” Simonds reminded his fellow MPs of a story from Tacitus. The emperor Nero “had two bosom counsellors.” They were Burrhus, “a man endowed with courage and resolution,” and Seneca, who had ample “wisdom and judgment.” Following their advice, the first phase of his reign was “very happy.” Strafford, however, was an “anti-Burrhus,” and Charles’s other adviser was a “little man of the clergy . . . an anti-Seneca” (Laud). Between them, Strafford and Laud had “turned a most gracious, just, and Christian prince into a Nero.” That the king had finally dismissed them Simonds compared to “a bright sun breaking out of a dark cloud.” Among their many offenses, Simonds drew special attention to one that had touched him personally. The summonses to sheriffs in England early in 1640 to appear in the Court of Star Chamber for their failure to collect all the ship money that had been demanded had been sent, he alleged, shortly after Strafford had arrived from Ireland. Strafford, he implied, was behind them. These summonses

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were “like thunder and lightning” to the sheriffs who received them. They “would within the compass of half an age have ruined all the gentry of England.” It was, Simonds concluded, time to bring an end to Strafford’s delaying tactics and make him face a “speedy trial.”38 Strafford’s trial finally began on March 22 in the House of Lords, and the MP for Sudbury, like many of his colleagues, attended regularly through its final session on April 17. When Strafford’s skillful defense and his friends in the upper house raised doubts about whether the Lords would find him guilty, the managers in the Commons entered a bill of attainder in their house on April 10. On April 12, Simonds spoke against proceeding by bill because he feared that the bishops would have the votes to block it when it reached the House of Lords. He suggested that, since the bishops could not vote in a treason case, Strafford was less likely to wriggle free if the trial were persisted in.39 His opposition to the attainder, in other words, came from fears about its effectiveness rather than any sympathy for Strafford. As the debate on the attainder bill continued, Simonds said on April 15 that “we have but 3 things we possess: life, liberty, and estate” and that Strafford had invaded them all.40 In a letter written to Anne on May 4, he said that when, on April 30, the king had denied that Strafford was guilty of anything worse than a misdemeanor, he “dreamt of nothing but horror & desolation within one fortnight” and “the consideration of your selfe & my innocent children drew teares from mee.” He also described huge popular demonstration against Strafford that had occurred on May 3: “some seuen thousand citizens came downe to Westminster. Manie of them captaines of the cittie & men of eminent ranke. They staied each Lorde almost as hee came by, & desired they might haue speedie execution of Justice vpon the Earle of Strafforde, or they weere all vndone [and] ther wiues and children.”41 Speaking in the Commons on May 8, Simonds declared that the king should sign the bill because the evidence from the “Army Plot” proved that Strafford “in this late great and treacherous design . . . had a principal hand.” Therefore “as his head contrived it, so I conceived that the loss of his head would add an end to it.”42 Simonds’s fierce opposition to Strafford has to be understood in relation to the long-standing alliance between Strafford and Laud that had been alluded to when he had linked the two of them as evil counselors who had come close to making Charles I a neo-Nero in February. Simonds had always been deeply concerned about constitutional questions such as ship money and impositions, but behind that concern, religious matters always lurked.

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the assault on episcopacy On March 9, 1641, Simonds received a letter from his wife’s beloved aunt, Hanna Brograve. She besought him to “labur to the vtmost of yover power to advanc the septr of Christ.” He should not remain “content with a modest way bvt let vs have the holle way of god.” She urged him to study the Bible “to find ovt the way of Christ and then take he[e]d of balking any treuth or shvting o[u]er eies against any t[h]at god ofers.”43 This would not be the last letter he would receive from kinfolk and friends urging him to seize the opportunity afforded him by his presence in Parliament to advance the reformation of religion. He had, as we have seen, been doing his best to this end in the early weeks, and he continued his efforts in 1641. “My deare Loue,” Simonds had written to Anne at Ixworth Abbey on January 25, “it hath pleased God a little to checke the course of our happie proceedings in Parliament.” After “neare a thousand godlie ministers of England” presented the Root and Branch Petition for reform of the Church of England, the king called members of Parliament to come to Whitehall to hear his response. Charles “tolde us hee wished us to reforme all abuses in Church & Commonwealth but hee would haue the Bishops remaine as they did in Queene Elizabeths time.” Although this would have been good news to some, it disappointed the godly. “This doubtles,” Simonds continued, “the howse of Commons will neuer yeild vnto, & soe wee are against a rocke against which wee must necessarilie splitt if God alter not the Kings resolution.”44 The December 11 speech discussed above was merely the first of many, some short and some long, against those bishops and other clergy who neglected their spiritual duties in order to govern in temporal matters and enforced “innovations” in worship. On January 12, 1641, the Committee of the Whole House for religion discussed “the government of the Church as it now stands.” Simonds said of the bishops that “how ancient soever their order was, yet doubtless their baronies” were recent and that at a minimum they should be “restored to their primitive antiquity. For their intermeddling in secular affairs it was distasted in all times.” In the Parliament roll for 1371, both houses of Parliament had complained to the king that both the monarch and his subjects suffered when “clergymen were employed in temporal offices.” In Edward III’s reign, he had evidence that “the Archbishop of York was a sheriff,” and he claimed he could provide many other examples of bishops holding secular offices. He thought the restoration of “that sacred function to its pristine glory” was something that the good bishops would welcome. Only those “as did love their kitchen, their belly, and their ambition above the glory of God and the good of the Church” would be opposed.45

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Up to this point, Simonds’s remarks in the Commons identified him as an opponent of the Laudian churchmen and their involvement in secular affairs but not necessarily a man firmly committed to the destruction of episcopal church government itself. Or if he was so committed, he had been reluctant to say so unequivocally and publicly. On January 13, the very next day, another speech he made hinted at either a change in his thinking about what was needed or a discarding of his caution about speaking his mind. Sir Philip Parker brought in a petition from a group of Suffolk ministers requesting relief from the ceremonial innovations that Wren and his successor placed upon them. The ministers were Puritans who had been harried by Bishop Wren, Simonds’s nemesis in 1636. He quickly moved “that the greatness of the matter in question” called for “a speedy remedy.” Recalling arguments he had made in the late 1630s in his autobiography and his letters to the Queen of Bohemia and others, he argued that “some evil instruments in a church did more mischief than the common adversary” (meaning the pope and the Jesuits). “Woeful experience” had shown that “the pseudo-Lutherans of Germany” had ruined not only other churches there but themselves also. Turning to England, he stated that “a few wicked instruments amongst us at home have within the space of some fifteen years more weakened and undermined the truth than all the whole popish and antichristian party by their conspirations and machinations could do in sixty years before.” In 1626, fifteen years earlier, nothing in his letters suggest that he understood that the York House conference had signaled Charles I’s adoption of the Arminian agenda. By 1641, however, Simonds could look back and understand its importance. In his speech, he bemoaned the lost opportunity to transform the “greater part of the clergy . . . from brazen, leaden, yea, and blockish persons, to a golden and a primitive condition.” But the chance had been missed because “the prelates had been debased and adulterated by the addition and intermixture of their temporal baronies with their ecclesiastical functions.” Thus, “all the miseries, calamities, civil wars at home, and losses and dishonors abroad had originally proceeded and fundamentally risen from them.”46 This was to lay at the door of “the prelates” everything that had gone wrong, and it presaged the harder line against them that Simonds was taking. Although Simonds had avoided public statements against Laud and his allies before the Long Parliament opened, his animosity was unrestrained once it commenced. He had presented a petition from “divers of the gentry and others in Suffolk touching oppressions and innovations in . . . religion in the diocese of Norwich” on December 23, 1640, the target of which was the activities of Bishop Wren and his successor, Bishop

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Montague.47 On January 6, 1641, he lashed out at the Laudians by accusing them of making “an idol” of St. Paul’s Cathedral.48 Two days later he urged that a cleric who had said in the pulpit that “we ought to respect the commands of the Archbishop of Canterbury equally with God’s word” be declared a “delinquent” because “he had practiced a new part of idolatry in kissing the altar which was an old practice of the heathen” worshipers of Baal.49 When on February 5 London’s Alderman Isaac Penington introduced what Simonds called “an excellent act . . . for the abolishing of images and altars and rails,” it was untitled. The title later approved was “an act for the abolishing of superstition and idolatry,” the words “and idolatry” being moved by Simonds.50 During a February 25 discussion of a committee report on the punishment of John Bastwick, Simonds asserted that there had been “more cruelty” displayed in the cutting off of Bastwick’s ears “than was to be found amongst Turks and heathens.” Moreover, he continued, Laud was “the little active wheel . . . that set all the rest on work by his active motion” in Bastwick’s case and that if “this little nimble wheel” had not been stopped, he “might in time have overturned us all.”51 On March 22, Simonds reiterated his long-established hostility to bishops who held civil offices when he argued that bishops should be removed from the Privy Council: “it is the observation of one of the most able and wise men that ever this latter age bred,” meaning de Thou, “that miserable was that kingdom where clergymen sat at the steer of council.”52 In a major debate on the Root and Branch bill on May 27, he rebutted Sir John Culpepper’s assertion that episcopacy was not “so past hope of reformation” that it required abolition. In Simonds’s view, the bishops’ hold on “their temporal employments be such a Diana to them” that they would not give them up and thus there was “little hope” they could be reformed. He went on to say that there was no “need to study long for a new church government, having so evident a platform in so many reformed churches.” This was his first statement advocating abolition of episcopacy itself. Earlier in the debate Edward Hyde had said “that the Church and state of England had flourished many hundred years” with the episcopal government “we now enjoy. I desired him to remember that the government now established is not yet an hundred years old” and that it had been preceded by a government that had been “the very height and apex of all superstition and abomination . . . . And sure if such times of ignorance and cruelty should return, many of us here must look for little better safety than the fire,” meaning, of course, the burning of heretics that had consumed Marian Protestants and before them Lollards.53 Conrad Russell pointed to this exchange as “a clash of two rival ideologies” in

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that it was “the difference between the belief that the church of England was a reformed heir of the Roman church, and the belief that it was a new church.”54 Simonds added that Denzil Holles, John Pym, and others spoke later in the debate “against the government of the Church by bishops,” and they “showed that our bishops had well near ruined all religion amongst us and were not willing to any the least reformation.”55 When the bill was next debated on Friday, June 11, 1641, Simonds had left the House to take a walk “in Westminster Hall behind the shops near the Court of Common Pleas.” He there encountered the famous Puritan preacher, Stephen Marshall, who had met the night before with Pym, Hampden, Harley, and others who were planning to return to discussion of the bill the next morning. Marshall asked him why he was “not in the House, and besought me to make hast thither because they were in agitation about the great business of the bill for abolishing bishops.” Simonds answered that he had left “but a little before and heard no inkling of it at all.” Why, he asked Marshall, had he not received “notice of it as well as others?” In any case, Simonds then rushed back to his room “near the Hall” to find the “fragmentary notes” for the speech he intended to make on the subject. While there, his friend John Moore came to tell him that “the bishops’ bill was in agitation.” When Simonds got back to the House, he found William Pleydell in the midst of his speech against the bill. Because Pleydell “read divers quotations in Latin out of the fathers and councils, some in the House disliking, he was once or twice interrupted.” Ever the stickler for free speech, even (or especially) when he planned to refute the speaker, Simonds stood up and urged that Pleydell “might be patiently heard out” so that he could “receive an answer.” Pleydell then finished his speech and was first opposed by Sir John Wray, who said “that bishops were self-servers and self-seekers.”56 After Wray spoke, Simonds began: “We are now entering upon the highest debate,” Simonds began, “that ever was handled in Parliament” since Elizabeth’s first parliamentary session in 1559. He pointed out that the “godly bishops” Pleydell had quoted lived during “the first 500 years after Christ” and that they “wholly differed from the prelates of our times.” Between approximately 500 and 1500, the documentary evidence depicted “all the pride and all the tyranny of the pope himself and his subordinate ministers who by force and sword sought to destroy and root out all such as opposed them.” Therefore Pleydell’s “long citations” from the early Church Fathers were irrelevant. Later in the debate, Simonds argued that “a full reformation” had been blocked by “the prelates in all ages.” Indeed, he continued, “the first reformation of religion” in England began “under a child,” Edward VI. What happened to the reformation when Ed-

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ward died and his half-sister Mary succeeded him “we all know.” Next came Elizabeth, and she “without the assistance of a royal husband” and beset by “potent enemies” abroad, nevertheless “settled a beginning of a reformation rather than a reformation.” To support the statement in the preamble to the bill under debate which said that episcopal church government had long been a “hindrance to the full reformation of religion,” Simonds concluded by reminding his colleagues that the prelates had continued their convocation after the dissolution of the Short Parliament in 1640. “What did they in that Synod? Did they ease our burdens? Did they admit the least step of reformation?” On the contrary, “they made our burdens heavier, and instead of making up the rent of the garment they split it down from the neck to the feet” and passed “a number of dangerous canons and a wicked oath.” “If God had not prevented them,” he asserted (and alluded to Massachusetts), they would have “banished first our Godly ministers and then made us all that had any care of preserving ourselves . . . to have left our native countries and all that had been near or dear to us only to preserve our souls.”57 Clearly, Pym, Hampden, and Harley did not realize the depth of Simonds’s animus against “the prelates.” Perhaps his conservatism on other issues and his constant desire to find ways to leave the door open to agreement with the king misled them into thinking that he wanted to preserve episcopacy. They were wrong.

The Bereft Husband Lady Anne D’Ewes’s last pregnancy had come to a successful conclusion at Ixworth Abbey with the birth of a daughter who was named Elizabeth in January 1641. “My deare love,” she wrote to her husband on January 18 that thanks to God’s “gratious providence” she was “prettie strong though I was somewhat feaverish at the beginning.” Isolda and Sissilia were with her, and all four of them were doing “prettie well.”58 Her beloved and aged grandmother, Dame Ann Barnardiston, had become so infirm that she could neither write nor sign her name, but she dictated a letter to Simonds on January 16 saying that she took “noe small comfort” from the news of “the safe deliuery of your Ladie, since God has pleased to add an other branch to your familie.” She prayed that God would comfort Simonds that the child was not a son because “the same God who hath for reasons best knowne to himself denied you the comfort of a Sonne, can nay he will yf he sees yt best for you, make you the father of one or many sonns yet before you leaue this world.” She made a mark in lieu of her signature.59 In March and perhaps early April Anne stayed in London with Simonds, and she visited the Ellyotts in Surrey from midApril through late May.60 Back at Ixworth by July, she became quite ill.

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But on Thursday, July 15, not yet recovered, she went from Ixworth to Stow Hall, and as will be seen below, the reasons for this move became controversial. In his parliamentary journal entry for this day, obviously written somewhat later, he said that he spent the morning at the office of Lord Privy Seal about “my grant of a baronet’s place . . . but oh, alas, this was the fatal Thursday in which my most dear wife, my greatest worldly comfort, removed most fatally from wretched Ixworth to her great hurt if it did not undoubtedly occasion her very death.”61 The distance she traveled (probably by coach) is less than two miles. It appears that the illness had not yet been diagnosed as smallpox on July 15..In Simonds’s August 2 letter to his secretary James Hornigold, he wanted to find out “what shee said when she first fatallie returned to Stow & what afterwards on the saturday morning or sunday morning when shee first understood it was the small pox; whether shee did at the first knowledge of it, certainlie apprehend her owne death.”62 On Monday July 20 Hornigold wrote from Stow Hall to his master at Westminster with news that must have worried Simonds deeply. Knowing that he was beset with “many feares and cares” about Anne’s illness, the secretary reported that on the previous afternoon “my Lady was somewhat chearlier then shee had been” earlier in the day. That night, however, “shee could take none or very little rest,” the effect of which was to render her “more sensible of her disease and make her feare that the want of rest will very much weaken her.” Her condition was further aggravated by the lack “of the Societie of her friends and especially of your Worship her dearest friend.” Hornigold thought that if Simonds could visit, his “presence would administer noe small comfort to her.” Yet she also was afraid that if he came his health might suffer and even cause “a shortening of your dayes.” Everyone at Stow Hall believed that the worst phase of her sickness was over and that she would soon recover if only they could convince her “to desist from the . . . distracting thoughts and feares which possesse her very much.” The doctor said that she was in “noe danger . . . if there bee noe cold taken.” James then closed the letter, but Anne told him to add that Simonds was “by all meanes not to come to her but as yow please.”63 Hornigold wrote again on Tuesday to say that the day before Anne had slept well and that “it was noe small ioy that did possesse my Spirit” when he saw her “soe chearly as shee was yesterday.” That night, however, she could not sleep and again was in great fear that she would never see Simonds again. This time, Hornigold said, that if his master could come his presence would “administer great comfort to her drooping Spirit.” He added that this was now her wish as well.64 By this time, word of Anne’s plight was spreading in the wider family. Wiseman

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Bokenham wrote to Simonds from Thornham on July 23 and said that he was “most heartily sorry for your Lady, but I trust soe much goodnes, soe much perfection was not sent into the world, soe soone to be obscured, I hope the worst is past, which I do hartily pray for.”65 Simonds must have obtained leave to go into the country, although there is no record of it in the clerk’s journal of the House of Commons. He spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at Stow Hall with Anne. He was back in London on Tuesday morning, July 27, having spent the previous night on his return from Suffolk at “Burnt Wood” (now Brentwood) in Essex.66 Anne died at midnight on Tuesday, according to the letter Richard Damport sent to Simonds the next day.67 She was twenty-eight years old. Simonds, mistakenly confident that she was returning to health, had reentered the fray at Westminster on the last afternoon of her life. A Committee of the Whole House was debating the part of the bill “touching episcopacy” that concerned cathedral revenues. Simonds moved that the group of commissioners that the bill would put in place to administer the church’s funds in each county should have the power to spend the money “for the maintenance of learning and piety.” Sir John Hotham called for greater specificity because this phrase was “too uncertain and general; for the Brownists and sectary thought theirs was piety, and one man calls this learning and another man that learning.” Simonds answered that he thought the “words of piety and learning though they were general yet they were certain.” He admitted that “if ignorant men were to be judges of learning” Hotham would be correct, “but those who have but entered into the suburbs thereof do know that learning consists of arts and tongues” and that the way to maintain piety was “to abolish whoring, swearing, and drinking, and to increase preaching and praying.” He suggested that “a greater certainty” would be achieved by adding the phrase “for the advancement of true religion.”68 This was done, but Simonds had little time to savor his success. He was in the House on July 28 and participated in a debate about whether the Parliament could continue to operate when the king was out of the kingdom and had not commissioned them to proceed. Since the king was contemplating a trip to Scotland, this was a matter of great concern. The shattering news of Anne’s death must have reached him that evening, because the next entry in his journal is dated Tuesday, August 3. It opens in Latin and in cipher: “Alas, alas, after the death of my wife, alas, unexpected, I was absent for a few days from the assembly, and yesterday when I was here I sat as if senseless. Today I took up a manly spirit and, submitting myself to God, I did not neglect public affairs.”69 Simonds’s long, anguished August 2 letter to Hornigold instructed him to “penn a discourse of all the passages of her sicknes from the first to

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the last excepting the three dayes I was ther: but especiallie of that which happened those two dreadfull dayes after my departure of which the last was to her a day of rest & glorie.”70 His first question was “how yow & all the rest I left behind could want soe much discretion & conscience as not to send after mee when you found my dearest Joy to grow worse & worse.” If James had sent word to Damport, “hee would either haue followed mee himselfe or haue sent a man & an horse after mee.” Having written that, however, Simonds had second thoughts and speculated that God had chosen “for the greater triall & humiliation of my pious wife his deare child, to blinde your eyes as hee did mine.” If so, God himself might have “before shee left this worlde” have given her “comforte without other helpes.” Even as he flailed about in shock and grief, his devotion to Anne led him to seek information that would help him convince himself that she had died knowing she was among God’s elect. He recognized that the series of questions he was sending to his secretary would take time to answer, but he wanted “a full answeare this weeke,” even if it required that Hornigold “sitt vpp all monday night” completing it. The second question was the request for the detailed narrative of her final days alluded to above. Thirdly, he hoped assurance could be provided that he had not done her a disservice because of the way—“certainlie perswaded shee would recover” as he was—that he had “lost soe much pretious time in deluding her pretious glorious soule with hope of life” when he should have been spending “moore time with her to prepare her for heaven. . . . Ah James this misapprehension of mine hath cost mee many a sigh & teare, although I was as innocent in it, as my poore infant at nurse.” The fourth item on his list was not so much a question as a restatement of a concern he had stated earlier. He bemoaned “the same bitter roote of my misapprehension” that set in when “I saw the blisters to runn” and “thought her danger was past.” He therefore assumed that since there was no need for him to stay, he could go back to London “with a cheerefull heart,” tell all their friends that she was recovering, and assure them that she “had noe other trouble but of the losse of her naturall beautie.” If he had had “the least thought” of what lay ahead, he would have “staied though with the hazard of my life.” He hoped that Hornigold and the others had assured her he left only because of “the certaine apprehension of her being past danger.”71 Simonds also wanted to know whether Anne had made any “requests for mee to performe” for the children or her friends and whether, when in the last few hours, she had “some little time to buckle vpp herselfe against death, to meet it with some willingnes at the least”? The fifth question may or may not have been a fair one to put to poor beleaguered Horni-

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gold, but it yields insight into the approach Simonds would have taken to serving as a physician to Anne’s soul had he remained at Stow Hall for two more days. When Anne had expressed fear that she lacked “the assurance of Gods loue . . . why did yow not looke out comforts” from the Scripture or from “Mr Bifeilds Marrow”? How could you have been “soe ignorant or besotted as not tell her that desire of assurance & complaint of the want of assurance, was assurance it selfe”? Simonds desperately sought indications that “before her death, shee expressed some moore comfort, then when yow wrote unto mee on tuesday morning: oh yow would ever ravish my soule with ioy to informe mee of it.” This was not because he had the least doubt “that shee is a glorious Saint in heaven; but that it might encourage us that are lyving to follow her godlie example.” Indeed, “it might harden the wicked in ther wickednes” to think that “such an holy childe of God as shee was” nevertheless departed from this life “without one smiling countenance of God vouchsafed to her.” Anne herself had told him that she “did not soe much feare death as that in dying of this hott & violent disease, shee might by words and impatience dishonour God. Her soule & minde weere both heavenward.” He signed this letter as follows: “Written by the most desolate Simonds D’Ewes.” Before he sent it, however, he must have received more from Hornigold that raised his spirits, and he added a long postscript. Unfortunately, these letters are missing, but they provided much of what Simonds longed for. Oh James my soule reioiceth in your last letters. Oh I see God is a good God to his children; Blessed for ever be his name that gave my holy yoakefellow those glorious comforts before her death: & blessed be God that made use of soe weake an instrument as you weere to comforte her, . . . I see now though shee weere at some distracted in her thoughts, yet shee had at other times a cleare iudgment; & an elevated spirit from Heaven. oh it will not a little ioy mee in my death to consider I shall goe to her.72

Simonds expressed disappointment that Mr. Chamberlain had failed to visit her or to preach a funeral sermon at her interment, but he convinced himself that it had been God’s design to deny to her the company that Chamberlain or himself might have provided because He had decided to give her “those holy refreshings” which by no means all “of his deare children vpon ther deathbedds” had enjoyed. He asked Hornigold whether Anne said “anye thing after her last sleepe during the halfe houre that shee liued and what.” He wanted to know “the expresse time & as neare as may be about what houre of the day, & on what day shee plucked or pulled offe her rings from her fingers; and how it was possible for her to gett them offe without great paine in respect of the pustulations or small pox vpon her fingers.” Finally, he sought “the verie houre as neare as yow

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canne when yow had that blessed discourse with her; & how long after shee had those heavenlie expressions.” Although he was disappointed that Hornigold’s “carelesnes in not writing one worde to mee by Silas of these comfortes shee found” had caused him to undergo “infinite almost greifs & anxietie of soule,” he was grateful to know of them at last. He countermanded the order at the beginning of the letter to the effect that Hornigold provide answers to his questions quickly. Rather, he could now “take a full weekes or fortnights time to sett downe all this excellent storie of the sicknes & death of this glorious Saint of God.”73 Hornigold set about the task he had been given with energy and zeal. He created a questionnaire spread across three sheets of paper and recruited Thomas Downes to interview the maids and other servants who had been present at Stow Hall during Anne’s illness and record what she said and did in the final days. The questions in Hornigold’s small, regular hand alternate between Downes’s uneven, awkwardly written answers. For example, Hornigold told Downes to “inquire of the Widd[ow] fforman and of Anne Raby” when Anne had told “Goodwife fforman to speake to my Master to bee good to the poore.” Downes replied that she had said this at about eight in the morning on Tuesday “and charged her she should not forget it 2 or 3 times.” Downes was also to find out “whether my Lady spake those wordes that she should goe to the Angelles before, she had taken the Cordiall which the Doct[or] sent,” and his answer was that “it was before she took the cordiall the same day.” Did she, Hornigold asked for Simonds, “speake chearly and unda[u]ntedly, when she tooke the Cordiall and said that it should bee the last she should take.” Downes’s informants told him that she had said precisely that “and never toke any thing after but was very cheerly after it.”74 Presumably, it was this sort of detail that had been missing from Hornigold’s initial reports to Simonds but came in time to give him the surcease from grief that he had described in the postscript of his August 2 letter. When he wrote to his old friend Joachimi on August 8, he reported the terrible news of Anne’s death and mentioned yet another devastating loss. On the day before Anne died, their firstborn child, Anne, had died in “Stepney either by the plague itself or a most pestilent fever.”75 She was eleven years old, and this meant that of the five boys and five girls to whom his wife had given birth, only three daughters remained. On August 16, Hornigold reported that the two older girls, Sissilia and Isolda, would be on their way to Albury in Hertfordshire on the next day where they would be looked after by the Brograves, and the baby would remain with her nurse for a time.76 Although Simonds attended parliamentary sessions with some regularity after August 1 and spoke occasionally, for the rest of month he

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was much quieter than he had been before Anne’s death. His journal frequently says that things “of little moment” were discussed, and many of his journal entries are—for him—brief. This may have been because he was troubled not only by grief but also by the perplexing behavior of the widows Denton and Stuteville at Ixworth on July 15. This had been the final question in his August 2 list for Hornigold. “It doth infinitelie trouble my soule,” Simonds had then written, that Anne had been “meerelie cast away as the meanest servant the Lady Denton keepes could haue been” from Ixworth. Anne had told him “shee was all ouer of a sweate when shee came away: and yet saied shee, my Lady Denton neuer offered mee to stay.” He told Hornigold that he had talked to people “skilfull in that disease” and been told “that remouall being in a sweat without all question cost her, her life.” This was because she was probably in the third day of her illness when “the pox would that night haue come out in that sweate . . . naturallie” but was “checked & retarded” by the move.77 On September 2, he drafted separate letters to Lady Denton and Lady Stuteville. To the former, his stepmother, he said that “alas Madam I neuer wrote with a moore sadd or a moore vnwilling heart to yow. My calamitie hath laied mee soe low as should yow see mee yow would scarce knowe my mourning countenance.” He said that at Ixworth on July 15, Ann had been “in soe extreame a sweate as it turned all she had on into a muckwett.” But at ten in the morning she had “found no remorse or pittie, noe offer for her to stay,” so she decided to go to Stow Hall. Her maid tried to dissuade her, but Anne said “I must goe whatsoeuer hurt comes of it, seeing no bodie offers mee a stay.” She also said that if she had been “at Busbridge my sister Eliot would loose her life before shee would parte with mee thus.”78 His letter to Lady Stuteville went over the same ground in somewhat greater detail about the course of the disease. “Ah Madame,” he asked her, how they could have decided “to hazard soe tender and delicate a body to the open aire in such a condition: being there was noe necessitie. . . . God protected you all when your daughter was sicke of the same disease and was his hand shortned now?”79 It appears that these were not the first expressions of his anger toward the widows. On August 31 Thomas Downes wrote to say that he had been at Ixworth Abbey and showed Lady Denton “the letter wherein . . . you taxe them all as giltie of my ladies death . . . for which they haue shed many teares.”80 Eventually, good relations between Simonds and the ladies Denton and Stuteville were restored, although how the rapprochement was achieved is unknown. Perhaps they convinced him that they had not realized how ill Anne was and that they assumed she would recuperate better at her own home.

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The MP—August 1641 to July 1642 On July 30, 1641, the House of Commons appointed a committee to make recommendations concerning what the Parliament could do and not do during the king’s trip to Scotland. On the morning of August 6, the committee proposed that, in concert with the House of Lords, the king be asked “to appoint a custos regni during his absence.” That afternoon, Simonds spoke for the first time since his wife’s death. He opposed the motion to seek “a locum tenens or viceroy” during the king’s absence because he had found no precedent whatsoever for such a thing in his extensive reading of the records of English history.81 When on August 11, the House took up the question of the bishops’ crime in “making the new Canons,” he noted that the Speaker “himself called upon me several times” to speak on the subject, and Lenthall was not disappointed. Simonds delivered yet another thunderous condemnation of Laud’s 1640 canons as “an high offense” that called for “very great and notorious punishment” which should include loss of the bishops’ seats in the House of Lords.82 But when Henry Marten urged that parliamentary ordinances should have “equal force and power with an act of Parliament” on August 27, Simonds was outraged. “An Ordinance in Parliament,” he asserted, had long been used “to bind the members of either House, but never was of any force to take from the free subjects of England their goods against their will.” Since the ordinance in question sought the disarming of Catholic recusants, he added that there was “no man living” who had “a worse opinion of recusants than I have. But as long as they continue free subjects of England I desire they may enjoy the privilege of subjects.”83 When a bill to help poor debtors was under fire on August 30, Simonds acknowledged that it had flaws that needed attention but that it could still “be made a good bill.” It was, he thought, un-Christian “that men who had nothing to pay might . . . starve and rot in prison” and that much might be learned from the Netherlands, where those debtors who could not pay were “set on work to maintain themselves and to discharge so much of their debt.” The House nevertheless rejected it.84 reform of religion On Tuesday, August 31, the House returned to a subject dear to Simonds’s heart, Sir Robert Harley’s bill for the abolition of the “superstitious” altar rails the Laudians had imposed and the removal of “communion tables to some convenient place.” Simonds moved “that the chancels might likewise be levelled as they were formerly before these late innovations.” A committee was created that included Pym, Simonds, and

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others to perfect the bill, and it met that afternoon in the Inner Court of Wards.85 Pym reported on Wednesday from the committee, and the draft included the requirement for the removal of the rails and the moving of the communion table from the east end of the church. It included Simonds’s suggestion that “the word ‘adoration’ was struck” in favor of the phrase “by bowing of the body.” Sir John Culpepper then urged that “as we had provided a remedy against the abuses” of the Laudian kind, “so we would likewise provide a remedy against such as did vilify and condemn the book of common prayer . . . on the other.” Culpepper’s motion was followed by a debate “for the space of near upon two hours” between its supporters and opponents. When he spoke during this exchange, Simonds made an attempt to square the circle. The House had, he said, agreed to eradicate things that “were gross, open, and notorious abuses such as tended to the scandal of men’s consciences and the subversion of religion.” In a gesture to Culpepper and his allies, he said that he desired “that the Book of Common Prayer which is established by law might peaceably and quietly be made use of till it were purged and amended by like authority.” However, he insisted that the book intended here was the one used during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James rather than the one “alterred by Dr. Cosin in which there are at least forty material adulterations and wicked additions of his.” Therefore, he asked that the draft bill “may stand as it is now drawn and agreed upon.” Simonds thought that the ayes had it, but the opponents called for a division and won it 55–37. The bill was then sent back to the original committee, and Simonds, Pym, and the others went back to the Inner Court of Wards at four that afternoon. They decided to add a provision which said that “none should condemn or deprave the Book of Common Prayer to the actual disturbance of the congregation.”86 This outcome allowed Simonds and his godly allies to keep working for a complete purgation of the liturgy despite the defeat of their larger purpose, at least for the moment, by Culpepper and other proto-Royalists. The struggle over the prayer book continued on September 9, 1641, the last day before the recess that would last until October 20. On that day, the House of Lords called for the printing of an order defending the use of the prayer book and punishing those who neglected it, and Simonds resisted it vigorously. He said that, although important steps had been taken to “restore to the subjects of England their true liberties” with respect to their “estates and persons,” the struggle to do the same for “their consciences” was far from completion. In particular the “one great bill” for the abolition of episcopacy had not yet passed. The widely expected and hoped for religious reform was stalled at a time “when all men who loved the truth

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expected a mitigation of those laws already established touching religion and not a severe execution of them.” Everyone knew “with what insolency and cruelty the prelates of late years have urged the use of the common prayer book and the ceremonies,” and this was the time “to remove these burdens” rather than to increase them. Simonds therefore moved the issuance of a “declaration” to the nation that “although the business of disbanding the armies did keep us from looking into religion all this time, yet it should be the first thing which we would set upon” after the coming recess. His motion was “well approved by the House” and passed quickly.87 Simonds’s whereabouts for the rest of September are uncertain. He had no reason to return to Stowlangtoft, but it is likely that he went for some part of the time to Hertfordshire to see his daughters who were living with Hanna and John Brograve. By no later than October 12, he was back in London because he took notes at the meeting of the recess committee chaired by John Pym on that Tuesday. This was a group of forty-seven members (including Simonds) that was to meet on Tuesdays and Saturdays (and “such other times as they shall think fit”) until the Parliament reconvened.88 When this Committee of Forty-Seven met on Saturday, October 16, Simonds spoke concerning a petition from a churchwarden at St. Mary Woolchurch in the City who sought advice as to how he should recoup the cost of defacing the statues on tombs there pursuant to the Commons’ order of September 8 “for the removing of idolatrous pictures.” Simonds described “this man’s indiscretion” as a source of “a great Scandall upon the House of Commons” because the intention had been that tombs should not be touched. It was no part of the House’s purpose “to deface all Antiquities.” He acknowledged that the churchwarden was an “honest man” whose motive had been good, but he moved that “we might have the tombs again repaired.”89 This episode provides an interesting example of the tension between Simonds’s genuine and consistent support for the eradication of “idolatry and superstition” from all churches on the one hand and his deep and abiding interest in the genealogies of England’s landowning families and the preservation of all records (including tomb decorations) that were part of their heritage. the “incident ” in scotland and rebellion in ireland When the recess committee had its final meeting on Tuesday, October 19, Pym electrified his colleagues by reading letters about “the Incident,” a failed plot hatched by the king to arrest his leading opponents in Scotland. Simonds commented that “it was the wonderful providence of God” that

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this was revealed just as the parliamentary recess was ending because its defeat would “be a meanes to prevent also whatsoever had been plotted here.”90 The Long Parliament reconvened the next day, but attendance was poor since the required quorum of forty was not present at the outset and, as Simonds put it, “we were necessitated . . . to sit together about a quarter of an hour and to do nothing.” The quorum achieved, Pym began with a lengthy report on the work of the Committee of Forty-Seven during the recess which concluded with the reading of letters about “the new troubles now happened in Scotland.” The first MP to speak was Sir Benjamin Rudyard, and Simonds followed him by calling for a thorough investigation of the dangerous possibility that “the Incident” in Scotland might be followed by something no less sinister in England. “Those black and evil spirits which plotted this in Scotland,” he feared, might well have “conveyed some of that influence hither.” Moreover, he continued, “the true root and spring whence all these conspiracies do arise” must be examined. It was the Arminian churchmen—“those linsey-woolsey clergymen amongst us”—who “devour the fat and wealth of the church, correspond with the Romanists and discover the secrets of our state to foreign parts.” Linsey-woolsey was a coarse, cheap cloth made of a mixture of linen and wool, and in this context it meant an impure and thus dangerous mixture of religious error with truth. These men and the papists, Simonds continued, “falsely conceiving that to be Truth which is not” and sought to “subvert the True Religion professed amongst us.” The papist attempt to eradicate Protestantism in England would be hopeless if they were “not assured of a party they have in our Church”—meaning, of course, Laud and his allies. Simonds moved that the Commons not merely confer with the Lords carrying “a bare narration but propose some means also for the preventing of our future dangers to which I conceive the settling of the matter of Religion will be as a salve to cure all our sores.” Over opposition from Falkland and Hyde, a version of Simonds’s motion passed “after a long debate.”91 Simonds’s hostility toward the “linsey-woolsey” clerics flared again on October 28 in the debate on a motion seconded by Strode for a bill that would require the Parliament to have a veto on the appointment of “the great officers of the King and of his Counsellors.” That went too far for Simonds, who expressed his belief that such appointments were “an ancient and undoubted right of the Crown” and thus a prerogative he would defend because of his “general duty as a Subject” and by his having sworn “the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy” and “the late Protestation of this house” (that is, of May 3, 1641). So far, his speech would presumably have been welcomed by Hyde, Falkland, and the king’s other supporters.

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But he then veered in a different direction by returning to his long-standing opposition to the presence of clergymen in such offices. He restated his argument that William the Conqueror had erred by giving baronies to clergymen who then “left the studie of divinity and preaching to follow policy and secular government.” The resulting “oppression of the Commonwealth” had grown to a greater height during Edward III’s reign, by which time clerics had “gotten all the great Offices of the Kingdome into their hands.” Although “a generall reformation” then ensued which had benefited England, “the Clergy by their power and subtlety did soon after . . . get again into temporal offices.” In those days, “Bishops were not then as now raised from the dust but were often elected out of the noblest Families of the Kingdom.” In these days, the bishops “are our ruine” because when evil counselors urged “any oppression of the people” to the king, instead of opposing it they “poison and satisfy it with false principles.” Simonds moved for the impeachment of the thirteen bishops who had assented “to the making of those new Canons and wicked oath” that the House of Commons had already condemned. He concluded by singling out “the gentleman over the way (viz. Mr. Hyde) who thinks that all is well setled” on the religious front: “truly I rather think the Church is yet full of wrinkles amongst us and needs a great deal of Reformation which I hope we shall shortly see effected.”92 On October 29, Simonds joined those who opposed the king’s intention to install five new bishops (even though two of them were Simonds’s Cambridge friends Ralph Brownrigg and Richard Holdsworth).93 John Morrill’s contention that Charles I “saw his early Parliament as a flock of sheep blindly following some wily wolves” has its mirror image in Simonds’s conviction that the king was a sheep in thrall to the wily Arminian prelates.94 On Monday, November 1, came what Simonds called “the intelligence of a great rebellion in Ireland” and the intention of the rebels “that all the Protestants and English should be cut off.”95 Both Houses quickly took steps to raise forces to suppress the uprising, and Simonds fully supported this effort. On November 4, he answered Henry Marten’s argument against a bill authorizing the conscription of soldiers to go to Ireland on the ground that it was “against the liberty of the subject.” Simonds responded that the bill would “preserve the liberties of the subject” because “in a case of necessity when the next house to mine is on fire by the law of this realm mine may be pulled down to save the neighboring houses. And so now . . . we may pass this law though we shall for the present waive a part of our liberties.”96 A day later, he spoke in favor of Pym’s proposal to accept the offer from the Scots to assist in the fight against the rebels. One of his reasons was that otherwise “the kingdom of Ireland itself may

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be lost” because it looked as though “the Irish be everywhere Masters of the field” and might soon take even Dublin itself.97 During a debate on a bill to vote £400,000 to the Irish campaign on December 14, he spoke for it because a grant of that amount “now might save us the giving of £100000 hereafter.”98 News from Ireland arrived in quantity and was read in the House of Commons, but Simonds had other sources as well. For example, his papers contain a letter from a cleric named Roger Puttock in Dublin dated December 11 that describes the “generall insurrection not onely of the North, of a great part of Mounster, and Connaght, but of Leinster, and of the very pale itselfe.” Puttock explained how he had fled with his family to Dublin, having lost everything, and “many good men” had undergone “a glorious martirdome.” He claimed that the cruelty of the rebels “exceeded the very Turk killing, ravishing, stripping many thousands stark who through extremity of cold have perish[ed] in the feilds.”99 Simonds remained deeply concerned about the rebellion and would on April 27, 1642, promise to contribute £50 annually “without expectation of any [confiscated] land” for as long as the Irish campaign continued.100 Debate on Pym’s Grand Remonstrance began on November 9, 1641, and continued at intervals until it passed by the narrow margin of 159 to 148 on November 22. Willson Coates suggested that the final vote was “painfully crucial” for Simonds because it required him to settle, “before he was prepared to do so, a conflict in his own mind.” It made him face a choice “between his puritanism and his love of precedent.” Although, as Simonds put it, his “heart and vote went with it in the mayne,” Coates saw that there were powerful “arguments from precedent which the opponents of the manifesto could use against it.”101 Clauses 85–87 of the document charged that in 1640 the Arminians in the English clergy had, in Simonds’s words, transformed the convocation into a synod which “by an unheard of presumption . . . made canons” that were offensive to “the King’s prerogative, . . . the fundamental laws and statutes of the realm, . . . the right of Parliaments, . . . the property and liberty of the subject.” They also made canons “justifying their altar-worship, and those other superstitious innovations” they had established and in addition “imposed a new oath upon divers of His Majesty’s subjects . . . for maintenance of their own tyranny.” These measures carried “censures of suspension, excommunication, deprivation” designed to oust “all the good ministers, and most of the well-affected people” of England with the purpose of achieving “their own design of reconciliation with Rome.”102 These clauses neatly summarized the religious grievances that had induced Simonds to tear himself away from his “precious studies” by seeking election to the Long Parliament in order to confront the “impious bishops” and their

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“icon slavery.” But the king’s steps toward reform (such as the promotion of Holdsworth and Brownrigg) were not nearly enough to achieve the religious reforms Simonds thirsted for. On November 10, Simonds spoke on the question of whether the Remonstrance should include an accusation against “the whole late synod which made the new Canons” that would denounce those responsible by name. Simonds said that he “conceived it just to name all the Bishops and the rest, that soe all the world might see to what a miserable condition the Church of England was reduced” by their actions. It would, he opined, be “our glory that we desire not to conceal the errors of the ill members in our Church, but that we desire to purge them out.” To be sure, he conceded, some members of the synod were more at fault than others, but nearly all of them had “consented to what was done” and should therefore be pronounced “guilty of that crime which we lay to their charge.”103 By then it was growing late, so the House rose intending to return to the Remonstrance the next morning. The Irish rebellion and other urgent matters prevented further consideration of the Grand Remonstrance until November 15, when Simonds successfully opposed the use of terms such as “him and his” when referring to the king in the document. Instead, Charles I would be referred to throughout as “his Majesty,” thereby satisfying our Suffolk MP’s desire to minimize offending the king’s honor and maximize the chances for convincing him to exchange his “ill counselors” for good ones. Another member argued for the insertion of a statement that the king had “passed some of the late Acts which most concerned the good and liberty of the subject with a seeming unwillingness.” Simonds argued, however, that the House should avoid “the mentioning of all unwillingness whether real or seeming” and instead treat his signatures “as done willingly and cheerfully by him” in order to head off the possibility that the use of words such as “unwilling” might “prove very prejudicial unto us in time to come.”104 The next day, as the debate continued, Simonds spoke twice. First, he resisted the effort of what he called “the episcopal party” in the House concerning the clause which said that the Book of Common Prayer contained “errors and superstitions.” That party moved for the insertion of a clause authorizing the use of the book until an alternative should be promulgated. Simonds admitted that he had earlier yielded to the “laying aside of that clause” about the serious flaws in the liturgy. But, as he said, “my heart went with it,” and he had consented to its temporary withdrawal “so we might discontent no body.” Edward Hyde had argued “that many sober good men” did not want the Book of Common Prayer to be “taken away,” and Simonds admitted that “some sober men might be of that opinion and yet I durst boldly say that there were divers of the looser sort of the

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Clergy who . . . if they were sober to read it on the Sunday were scarce so all the six days before.” His second speech came in response to Sir Edward Dering’s motion to strike the accusation that “the Bishops had brought in Idolatry and popery into the Church.” Simonds then quoted a speech Dering had earlier made to the effect “that the Church of England had been more endangered from Lambeth and the Thames than from Rome and Tiber.” “I think,” he continued, “that no man will doubt but Rome would have brought in Idolatry amongst us.”105 The final debate began shortly after noon on November 22, and Edward Hyde, Lord Falkland, Sir John Culpepper, and other proto-Royalists spoke vigorously against it. They argued that there was no precedent for the Commons to “make a remonstrance to the people, and that alone without the concurrence of the Lords.” Moreover, it contained many “harsh expressions” and hinted that the king would next be pressed to “take the advice of his Parliament in the choice of his Privy Council” and to consent to the abolition of episcopacy. Simonds left after some four hours because he recognized “that this debate . . . would be long and vehement.” He was suffering from a cold, but he acknowledged that there were points in the remonstrance he had formerly opposed. He was torn because he could not assent to those points, “although otherwise my heart and vote went with it in the main.” The contentious debate continued until midnight, and Sir Christopher Yelverton told him that “many particulars” were changed during that period, including some that Simonds “could not have assented unto.” We are left wondering—as perhaps he himself did—how he would have voted had he been there when the midnight division occurred and it passed by only eleven votes. He reported, presumably on the basis of what he heard the next day from Yelverton or someone else, that the lawyer Geoffrey Palmer had moved “that a protestation” against the Remonstrance might be “entered in the name of himself and all the rest upon which divers cried All, All, and some waved their hats over their heads, and others tooke their swords in the scabbards out of their belts . . . so as if God had not prevented it there was very great danger that mischief might have been done.”106 The passage of the Grand Remonstrance has been seen as a critically important success for Pym and an equally important failure for the king. Did the narrowness of his defeat help convince the king to make his next move? the attempt on the five members The Monday, January 3, 1642, session did not begin until after one o’clock, and initially there was no reason to expect trouble. Simonds had from the beginning of his parliamentary service over a year before served

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on the committee to reverse “the illegal proceedings in the Star Chamber” in 1637 against Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton, and the resulting bill received its first reading on this day. It was later reported that “one Mr. Buckle, a papist” had said that the members of the House of Commons “were a company of giddy-brained fellows.” Then John Pym moved that the mayor, aldermen, and councilmen of London should be sent a message urging them “to look well to the guard of the City” because “divers dangers were threatened against it.” Still later, according to Simonds, the MPs “were much amazed” when Pym announced “that his trunks, his study, and his chamber” and those of Denzil Holles had been “sealed up” by men sent by King Charles. Moreover, a “private intimation” had reached Pym that Attorney General Herbert had on the king’s instructions drawn up charges of high treason against Lord Mandeville and MPs Pym, Holles, Hesilrige, Hampden, and Strode. This news turned the House of Commons into its crisis mode. The MPs quickly agreed that the sealing up of trunks and chambers was “a breach of our privilege” and that the House’s sergeant should be sent to destroy the seals. Almost certainly, Simonds thought of the travails of his dear mentor Cotton after the searching of his papers in 1628. They also immediately sought a conference with the House of Lords to discuss these developments and also to consider whether “his majesty’s having a guard at Whitehall was a breach of our privileges also.”107 On Tuesday morning, Pym presented in the House of Commons the treason articles charging himself and four other MPs and one peer that the king had sent to the Lords and to the Inns of Court. Simonds noted that the House immediately sought a conference with the Lords “about the said articles as a scandalous paper against the members of either.” Word then arrived “that there was a great confluence of armed men about Whitehall,” and the Commons decided that the City’s leaders should be told “in what danger the Parliament was.” The House adjourned at noon and reconvened early in the afternoon. “About 3 of the clock we had notice that his majesty was coming with a great company of armed men,” and the five targets of the king’s anger were given leave by the House to “withdraw or stay within.” All but Strode departed, and it “was a pretty whiles before Mr. Strode could be persuaded to it.” Strode, “a young man and unmarried,” insisted that because he was not guilty he would “stay in the house though he sealed his innocency with his blood at the door.” In the event, just as “the van or forefront of those ruffians marched into Westminster Hall,” Strode’s friend Sir Walter Erle managed “to take him by cloak and pull him out of his place and so got him out of the house.”108 Shortly after 3 p.m., King Charles and the Prince Elector entered the

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chamber, and the MPs, Simonds wrote, “all stood up and uncovered our heads.” The king bowed to “either side of the house,” and the members bowed in return. He walked to the Speaker’s left, “coming close by the place where I sat, between the south end of the clerk’s table and me.” He asked the Speaker if Mr. Pym “were present or not, and when there followed a general silence that nobody would answer him,” he spoke again to ask the same question about Mr. Holles. No one spoke, and the king put his question directly to Speaker Lenthall. “Kneeling down,” Lenthall asked for pardon because “he could neither see nor speak but by command of the house.” The king then said, “well, well, ’tis no matter. I think my eyes are as good as another’s.” He then looked around “a pretty whiles to see if he could espy any of them” before walking out “in a more discontented and angry passion than he came in.”109 The House adjourned around 3:30 without then knowing about what Simonds called “the extreme danger we had escaped through God’s wonderful providence.” When he later wrote his account of the event, he asserted that the “the design” had been to seize the five members “by force and violence” if the House had refused to yield them “peaceably and willingly.” Simonds estimated that about eighty of the king’s four hundred men had squeezed into St. Stephen’s Chapel, all armed with swords and some with “pistols ready charged.” Since, he thought, he and his fellow MPs would have had to resist “for the preservation of the privileges of our house,” the “ruffians” would “have set upon us all if we had resisted in a hostile manner.” To be sure, he wrote, “the plot was so contrived as that the king would have withdrawn . . . before the massacre should have begun upon a watchword by him to have been given upon his passing through them.” He doubted, however, that if the five members had still been present a crew of men “so thirsty for innocent blood” would have waited for the watchword. Rather, the slaughter would have commenced “to the hazard of the persons of the king and the Prince Elector as well as us.”110 Because no violence occurred on January 4, some might wonder whether Simonds had an overly active imagination about the imminence of bloodshed. Two other diarists were present that afternoon. Sir Anthony Peyton wrote that the king was accompanied by “a great number . . . armed with swords and pistols,” but he said nothing about plots, watchwords, or violence. However, Roger Hill’s version of the day is more highly colored. Hill definitely feared what he called the “great danger” the MPs faced: “The king came in person into the commons house, attended with . . . about 4 or 500 desperate soldiers, captains, and commanders, of papists, ill-affected persons, being men of no rank or quality, divers of them being traitors in France, Frenchmen fled hither, panders

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and rogues.” The smaller number who actually entered the chamber, he claimed, were fully prepared “to fall upon the House of Commons and to cut all their throats” if Pym and the others were not turned over to the king.111 As we have seen, up to this point Simonds had repeatedly tried to get the “fiery spirits” such as Strode and Marten to moderate the wording of declarations to and comments about “his majesty.” He always strived to avoid giving unnecessary offense and to keep the door open to reconciliation. Charles I and his family left London on January 10, and, as we will see, Simonds quickly reverted to his usual stance against the “fiery spirits” even though he believed not only that there had been a plan to kill MPs that afternoon but that the king himself intended to give the command to initiate it as he was leaving the room with his five “traitors” in hand. Simonds never mentioned this “plot” again, although like most of his colleagues he continued to regard it as a massive breach of parliamentary privilege. Why did he go back to moderation if he was genuinely convinced of the king’s guilt in this matter? Why did he not move toward becoming a “fiery spirit” himself if he was convinced that the “plot” with its “watchword” was a reality? One possibility is that for some reason he never stated, he changed his mind and decided that his unidentified source for its existence was unreliable. Another possibility—the more likely one—is that Simonds continued to think as he had for years that the king remained entirely in the grasp of his “evil counsellors” and that the coup attempt was something the MPs should have expected. He switched back to his customary strategy—the one he had employed as sheriff of Suffolk—of studied caution and avoidance of direct and irreversible confrontation because there was always the chance that Providence would intervene to save the situation in one way or another. God, after all, could choose to remove the scales from the king’s eyes so that he would see that he had been misled all along. Or God might take the king from this life, perhaps enabling the Parliament to continue the process of reform with its leaders dominating a regency council for the young Charles II or someone else. “Gods wonderful providence,” Simonds was certain, had saved many lives on the afternoon of January 4. It could do so again. There was no doubt in his mind that if he and many others among God’s elect had died that day, God would sooner or later avenge them. His hero Coligny and thousands of Huguenots had died in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, but the Catholic League in France had eventually been defeated by Henry IV. The vicious papist oppressors came to the sticky ends he had chronicled in his Primitive Practise. Toleration of French Protestants had been established and remained in place in 1642, albeit straitened by Louis XIII and Richelieu. Yet the dan-

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ger that new plotters in England represented could never be ignored. Orlando Bridgeman, a Lancashire MP, reported to the House on January 11 the contents of two letters sent “by some papist who wished well to him.” This unnamed papist told Bridgeman that he should leave London for a time “because his stay there might be dangerous.” A debate ensued about how seriously to take this warning, and Simonds argued that they should recall “that the powder treason was discovered by a writing of less weight.” The man who wrote the warning to Bridgeman “had blood on his tongue and malice in his pen.” Simonds brought the matter up again two days later and said that he thought it “was merely one step of a design or plot hatched by the papists and prelates.”112 By the “prelates” he meant the Arminian bishops, and they remained always at the top of his list of enemies, as they were for his brother-in-law Sir William Ellyott in Surrey. On January 17 Ellyott wrote to complain of “these popish and proud Cleargye” who were “neuer at a greater heighte, what hopes they may conceaue I know not.” But he did know that their “Popish and Treacherous vicar” at Godalming had approached him to get his signature on a petition in support of the bishop. When Ellyott refused, he and the vicar then exchanged some “coarse language” before the man went off in search of more signatures, for which he had “good leasure for sure I am he hath neither will nor abilityes for preaching.”113 Ellyott would be one of fourteen witnesses against the vicar, Nicholas Andrews, in the successful attempt to have him ejected in 1643. He was quoted as having said that “preaching was the worst part of Gods worship” and that he would omit it altogether if he could.114 the “paper war” The months after the king’s withdrawal from London early in 1642 have been characterized by historians as a time of “paper war,” during which the king and his supporters and the Long Parliament and its backers worked to raise forces and gain control of arsenals and strongholds while publicly presenting themselves in proclamations and declarations as upholders of the constitution whose goal was to restore harmony between king and Parliament and peace and prosperity to the nation. Throughout this period, the critical thing for Simonds was that the Parliamentarians keep to the high road of seeking peace and reconciliation without yielding an inch on the fundamental principles of their cause. These included the preservation of Parliament and its privileges in the English polity and the maintenance of Calvinist doctrine and a liturgy purged of the idolatrous “altar worship” the Laudians had introduced into the Church of England. He was always a monarchist but never a re-

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publican or a Cavalier. With the House meeting at the Guildhall in London, he spoke on January 12 in support of a motion to urge the king to come back to London “for the begetting of a true understanding between his majesty and the Parliament.” He said that “this kingdom could never be safe or happy without the union of prince and people,” and that he hoped that “his majesty would return single to us and leave behind those Cavaliers that now attended him behind him.”115 Two days later he besought his fellow MPs to remember that, since there were “false reports” circulating that the Parliament intended “to lessen the king’s lawful authority, to prefer articles against the queen, and to crown the prince,” it was likely that “we may have false reports brought to us also of the king’s intention towards us . . . and therefore it highly concerns us to endeavor that a right understanding might be between us and his majesty.”116 When he arrived at the meeting of the House at the Grocers’ Hall on January 19, he found a debate about Strode’s proposal that any peers the king might create should not “have voices in Parliament without the assent of both houses.” Simonds opposed this because having a vote was “a hereditary right” for peers and, having committed themselves in the Protestation of May 1641 to protect Parliament’s privileges, “we cannot well vote this.” Members of the Commons would, he pointed out, rightly claim that it would be “a breach of our privileges if the lords should now send to us that no new members who were to be elected should have voices in the House of Commons without the assent of the lords.”117 Yet these positions that Simonds took must not be understood as a retreat from his commitment to persevere in the Parliament’s quest for the redress of its grievances. At the Grocers’ Hall again on January 22, he intervened in a debate about the “synod or national assembly of godly divines” that would be created to present proposals to Parliament “for the reformation and settling of church discipline amongst us.” Sir Ralph Hopton and others had argued that the members of this assembly had to be chosen by clergymen, but Simonds responded that Parliament could nominate them. This was evident from the “ancient Latin stories” written by “Gildas, Albanius, Nennius, and the Saxon Anonymus” that were “yet unprinted touching the first Britons.” They confirmed that the “great British synod called together for the abolishing of the Pelagian heresy” had lay members as well as clergymen.” Moreover, the “histories of former times” gave ample evidence “that in most of the councils the bishops and abbots who were sent thither were merely nominated by those Christian kings and princes from whose realms and dominions they came.”118 Later the same day, he returned to find that the defenders of the Book of Common Prayer were opposing a motion to ordain that “no godly minister

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might be punished” for refusing to observe the “burdensome ceremonies” it required. He reminded the MPs that when in the previous January the Parliament had required that “the neglect of the Common Prayer Book should be severely punished,” the result was that “all scandalous, loose, profane, ignorant, and popishly addicted clergymen took the advantage to continue their former superstitions and errors in contempt of the order of the House of Commons” on the grounds that the Lords had not concurred. It should therefore be ordered that “those godly, grave, and learned who out of mere conscience do scruple at the ceremonies and the Common Prayer Book . . . be excused from the practice and use of the same.” A “general acclamation of ‘Well moved’” ensued, and the motion passed.119 Additional evidence of Simonds’s continuing commitment to the defense of Parliament’s achievements appears in his reaction to the king’s refusal, in his message from Greenwich on February 28, to accept the Militia Ordinance. When the House then rejected the king’s answer and resolved that “such parts of this kingdom as have put themselves into a posture of defense against the common danger” had acted justifiably, Simonds was not opposed. It was a “sad day’s work,” he concluded, but he agreed that it was necessary.120 In the coming months and years, Simonds continued to resist some of the means that the Parliament would employ to raise the money needed to fight the civil war, but he continued to regard Parliament’s success as essential because otherwise the “true religion” would not prevail against the “prelates.” This is apparent in his answer to Sir Ralph Hopton’s assertion on March 4 that there was no longer any need to fear “a design to change the true religion and instead thereof to settle popery.” Simonds, however, said that he thought “there is greater cause to fear it now than ever heretofore.” News from Rome indicated that the pope intended to send aid to the Irish rebels, “and at home also we see that the malignant part of the clergy upon the least difference which falls out between his majesty and the Parliament take new heart.” The appointment of Dr. Walter Ralegh, “a notorious popish fellow,” as the new dean of Wells proved that the Arminian advance was continuing.121 On the next day, however, Simonds revealed his desire for accommodation. He addressed himself to part of a proposed parliamentary declaration which asserted that the king had refused to reveal “the names of such who had given evil counsel or false information to himself or the queen” and furthermore that he “had concealed them as if they were reserved for the acting of new exploits.” The first accusation was, he conceded, undeniable, but he opposed the second because it was a mere supposition about the future and not—or at least not yet—a fact. Others who spoke after him agreed, and “the passage

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was changed.” In cipher, he added his general opinion that “the declaration was . . . too fierce and sharp, and therefore I got as much altered in it as I could.”122 The clause of the declaration about evil counselors came up again for debate on March 8, and Simonds opposed Pym by arguing that the king was being asked to acknowledge that due to the acceptance of evil council he had done things that “if they had taken effect, would have destroyed kingdom, Parliament and justice.” Since, however, they had not yet “taken effect,” it would be better to omit the clause altogether.123 Yet again, Simonds struggled to find language that would make it easier for the king to come back to London and negotiate instead of remaining on the path toward war. Simonds restated his sense of what was needed on April 1 during a debate on the Parliament’s answer to the king’s most recent declaration: “I desire whatsoever answer we shall return to this message, we may frame it in the ancient reverential style which appears upon record, and that in the debating of it also like moderation of speech may be used and nothing uttered that may give just offense.” In his view, this royal message was the first to contain “so much asperity of expression,” perhaps because it had been written “suddenly” instead of slowly and thoughtfully. Parliament, he thought, should not make the same mistake.124 We know from hindsight that his campaign for moderation in language and indeed policy would fail, but it may be unfair to think of him as a Don Quixote pursuing an utterly hopeless quest. In this case, like others, a select committee of members of both houses had been appointed to draft the answer, and Pym and Simonds were members of it. Part of it concerned the king’s intention, later abandoned, to travel to Ireland to raise troops. When the committee reported to the House of Commons on April 14, Henry Vaughan objected to the part of the draft that said that the king’s effort to recruit soldiers was “to the terror of his people” because “by law there were many tenures in which the subject was bound to assist him in his wars.” Pym, according to Simonds, “answered superficially” with a view to proceeding to a vote “without any amendment at all.” This made Simonds, “just as the Speaker was standing up to have put the question,” to rise and speak. He answered Vaughan’s argument about the obligation of the king’s tenants to provide him with soldiers by saying that “anciently those wars were ever undertaken with the consent of the great council of the kingdom,” a consent that had not been sought in this case. There were, however, amendments that he thought needful. For example, “where we mention his majesty’s progenitors,” they should be referred to as “royal progenitors.” More important, he found the declaration self-contradictory because it asked the king “not to go into Ireland nor to levy men, and yet

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afterwards we tell him that if he will not grant our petition, we will do it of ourselves.” This was to assume that he would “refuse our requests, whereas for my part I shall both hope and pray that he will yield to our humble advice.” As he continued with his parsing of the draft, “some indiscreet and violent spirits interrupted me and called to the question.” The speaker reproved them, and Simonds expressed his disappointment that any members should “make such haste to a question of great weight.” Their declaration would, he reminded them, necessarily “be made public” and “all our expressions” must be carefully considered in the hope that “an accommodation between his majesty and us” could be achieved. When Simonds sat down, “Mr. Peard stood up and did with great vehemency reprove those foolish and indiscreet” MPs who had interrupted Simonds, and “many more in number that were discreet and sober men called upon me to still to speak.” He may have been somewhat surprised when John Pym “did with much discretion and modesty approve what I had spoken,” and Pym proceeded to “amend the said declaration according to the advice I had given.” The amended declaration then passed.125 We might suspect that, although Pym knew that the thin ice underneath him after the king’s return from Scotland had grown thicker as a result of the attempt on the five members in January, he had nothing to lose and possibly something to gain by making friendly gestures toward moderates such as Simonds. Charles had bared his fangs and demonstrated his contempt for parliamentary privileges on January 4, thereby frightening back into Pym’s camp many MPs who had been tempted to trust the monarch once again. Simonds found himself forced to face the fact that it might not be possible to avoid a civil war when he attended a conference of members of the Lords and Commons on Saturday morning, April 16, 1642. For some time, attention had been focused on the substantial supply of arms and ammunition at Hull in Yorkshire. The king was in Yorkshire and known to covet the munitions. The Lords voted in favor of moving “the magazine at Hull . . . to the Tower of London,” since otherwise the king’s advisers “would make use of those arms to disturb the peace of the kingdom.” When Simonds and the other MPs returned to the Commons, they quickly reported this news and obtained a vote supporting the resolution concerning the Hull magazine. Henry Marten then moved for an order to direct the commander of the fleet, the earl of Warwick, to carry it out. In his journal, Simonds recorded that these decisions were made “with as much alacrity as in other business (though 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).” The itali-

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cized words he wrote in cipher, often his way of indicating that he was recording his private conviction rather than something said or done in the debate.126 On April 22 the king sought entry into Hull and command of it and was refused by Sir John Hotham, the Parliament’s commander of the town. Charles then denounced Hotham as a traitor. News of Hotham’s action reached London and was announced in the Commons by Pym on April 26. The Lords “passed three resolutions” vindicating Hotham, and at Pym’s urging the Commons followed suit. Simonds pronounced “of the justice of these votes” and voted accordingly. Then, however, Strode moved “that Sir John Hotham should not admit the king in person” to Hull. “I spake against it,” Simonds wrote, “and I crushed it.”127 Three days later, he reiterated his support for “the clearing of Sir John Hotham, and the justifying of ourselves to the world, yet we ought to show that respect to his majesty as to do our uttermost endeavor to give him satisfaction also.” To do so would “give satisfaction in general to the whole kingdom . . . when they shall see that there is hope and possibility left of reconciliation” between king and Parliament.128 By May 16, 1642, however, reports reached London that Charles I was engaged in raising an army for use against Parliament, and Simonds gave a speech in which he asserted that he and his colleagues should continue “to use all good means” to the end that the king’s “eyes may be opened and cleared to see those things distinctly which are now hid from him by those mists which wicked informants have cast before him.” Yet it was also essential that they publish a defense of their actions so that the people of England could see that the Parliament sought only “the preservation of both king and kingdom, whereas . . . if those evil instruments about his majesty may prevail, they intend to bring a speedy destruction upon both. . . . For mine own part I think they must have a wisdom beyond the moon that dream of any happiness to themselves after the ruin of this Parliament, which I shall never desire to overlive.”129 When, four days later, the Lords asked the Commons to concur with their conclusion that the king “did intend to levy war upon his Parliament” and that “whosoever shall levy war upon the Parliament are traitors by the fundamental law of the land,” Simonds urged that a vote be delayed because of signs from Yorkshire that the king was drawing back from war and might, upon further deliberation, come to realize “the violent and dangerous counsels of those wicked persons about him.” In the event, however, as he put it, “the hotter and more violent spirits prevailing in number, the question was carried affirmatively.”130 He lost a round, but he had not yet lost the fight.

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the fiery spirits For several months, Simonds had found himself increasingly at odds not only with Hyde, Falkland, Culpepper, and other defenders of the king, but also with more radically minded men such as William Strode, Henry Marten, Nathaniel Fiennes, and Denzil Holles—the men he began to describe as the “fiery spirits.” His journal entry for January 29 stated that a message from the king that Speaker Lenthall had read to the House “was very graciously penned, but yet Mr. Denzil Holles, Mr. Strode, and others spake vehemently against it.”131 On February 8, Marten argued that the king ought to sign any bill that both Houses had approved, and “he conceived that the king’s vote was included in the lords’ votes as the whole commons of England were included in ours because he elected the peers as the commons did us.” Simonds, writing in cipher, noted that he was appalled by “this dangerous and ignorant speech of Mr. Marten’s,” but he then considered Marten “an honest man” and resisted “all bitter expressions in the refutation of him” which he then delivered.132 His opinion about Marten’s virtue would be short-lived. On March 9, Simonds reported that Strode “was very vehement” in his motion to impeach Attorney General Herbert for charging himself and the four other MPs with treason on January 3. Irritated that Strode was trying to divert the House to his own business rather than the more urgent question of the bill to raise £400,000 for the Irish service, Simonds blocked Strode’s motion.133 In his April 2 entry, he wrote that Mr. Nathaniel Fiennes “most ignorantly and untruly” claimed that the king could not veto bills passed by both houses and had to approve them. Simonds stood up and roundly proclaimed that “there is no question but the kings of England have always had and still have a negative voice in the passing of all acts of Parliament as well as an assenting.”134 When the king was at York early in May, he required two MPs who were there to stay with him rather than return to London as the House of Commons had requested. Marten argued that new elections be held to replace them, but Simonds found this “very rash and strange” and urged successfully that the men be given more time to comply.135 As these examples show, Simonds won some of his duels with the “hotter and violent spirits” and lost others, but contentions of this sort came more and more frequently. As Simonds’s struggle against the fiery spirits intensified, his brother Richard tried to convince him to leave London and come to York. Richard had served in the forces that Charles I had assembled for the Bishops’ Wars of 1639 and 1640, and during the spring of 1642 he was with the king at York. Charles had issued a proclamation calling upon peers and gentle-

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men to attend him there. On June 17, 1642, Richard wrote to Simonds with the goal of bringing him into the king’s camp. “Dear Brother,” he began, and then expressed his hope to “bee the happie inducement to bringe yow hether.” He offered to provide horses for Simonds’s journey north, and all he had to do was send a message to Richard’s friend Sir Henry Newton for “a Gray Gelding and a Bay Meare” that would be made available to him at Newton’s house at Salisbury court in Fleet Street. “Tis worth yowre journey,” Richard assured him, to become “an eye wittness of the justice and equity of ye kings proceedings.”136 On June 21, Simonds replied that he had frequently regretted that his service as an MP had taken him away from his “pretious studies” and the company of the “inestimable wife” he had lost the previous summer. He had nevertheless been called to his task “by his Maiesties writt” and thus had “noe other resolution but to continue heere” in the performance of his “dutie to God, his sacred Maiestie & the kingdome.” He insisted that he had neither said nor done anything to injure “the kings iust rights or the vpholding of that revenewe due to him.” That said, he believed he had done precisely “what my conscience dictated to mee to speak, in respect of that little knowledge I haue in the municipall lawes, and ancient records of this state.” There was therefore nothing that could be held against him “in the least measure by his Maiestie or anie at Yorke.” He stood “willing to redeeme the re-vnion of his Maiestie & the two Howses with my dearest bloud,” subject to one proviso that had always been foremost in his thoughts. The reunion had to be done in such a way that “Religion might be established in that power & puritie amongst us & preaching soe setled in those places wheere Atheisme, profanenes and ignorance now raigne, as that all men might know ther dutie to God & the King.” He did not have to spell out to Richard that this meant the king would have to give up his Arminian advisers and therefore reverse his religious course. He closed his letter by citing, as he had in letters to others during the Bishops’ Wars, the advice of the earl of Schomberg to Henry IV of France to the effect that the king was always the greatest loser by a civil war because “the people who weere slaine weere his people, the townes & cities which weere burnt weere his citties & townes.”137 A single sheet in Richard’s hand that was obviously written in great haste and lacked the usual affectionate salutation and a place or a date for its composition was his response to Simonds’s rebuff of the invitation to York. It begins with the statement that his colonel’s recent treatment of him had made him decide to resign his commission. He said that he assumed Simonds could not have been surprised by Richard’s long delayed response to what he called his brother’s “vnhandsome Letter” sent to York. That letter may well have been Simonds’s upbraiding of him for

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siring a bastard. On June 17, the “parliament” of the Middle Temple’s record contains the story: “A bastard child was brought into the House and laid at the chamber door of Mr. Richard Dewes, charged to be the father thereof, and to have begotten it in his said chamber.” The lawyers paid £5 for the child’s care and expected reimbursement from the absent Richard. It is easy to imagine Simonds’s anger about such a scandal and the letter he surely wrote to his brother about it, but the letter is missing. In any case, Richard said that, since Simonds had suggested that they might meet “with out troublinge any freindes,” he would come to London but could not long remain there. Therefore “by this bearer send me your answer when and wheare, & yow may bee assured I will be most secrett and punctuall.” In a postscript, he added that he guessed that the best “place & safest from discouery ware somwheare vpp the Teames [Thames] but I leaue to yow, so yow comm single and bee secrett.” If this meeting occurred—and it probably did—the result was a restoration of brotherly amity. Richard rejoined the royal army no later than August, but their subsequent communications were characterized by their former warmth.138 As will be evident below, Richard vigorously supported his brother’s quest for a wife in the autumn of 1642. Given the large number of occasions on which Simonds did battle with those he called “those hot, earnest men,” the “more violent spirits,” and “the fiery spirits,” it can be no surprise that their detestation of him grew.139 In his Latin diary, they were the “violenti.”140 He is likely to have borrowed the phrase from King James I who, in Book II of his Basilikon Doron (1603), described an early stage of the Reformation in Scotland during which “some fiery spirited men in the ministry got such a guiding of the people . . . as finding the gust of government sweet they began to fantasy for themselves a democratic form of government.”141 The king repeated it in a letter to the House of Commons concerning their December 3, 1621, free speech petition. He blamed the MPs’ petition on “some fiery and popular spirits of some of the House of Commons to argue & debate publicly of matters far above their reach and station.”142 Simonds was quite frank about his dislike for them and delighted in winning verbal bouts with them whenever he could. Sometimes he used sarcasm. For example, he mentioned on June 4, 1642, that Alexander Rigby had asked that the Parliament Roll for 1279 be examined to see whether it contained a particular statute. “It seems,” Simonds said, “his better employments have not suffered him much to converse with those rolls, for there is no Parliament Roll remaining of that year” (or any at all before the eighteenth year of Edward I’s reign).143 On April 4, Simonds spoke out against “the ignorant assertion of Mr. Nathaniel Fiennes that the king was bound to

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assent to such laws as were passed by both houses and of Mr. [John] Glyn, a lawyer, that when the king did anciently disassent to any of these laws, they were not statutes but only petitions, which was a more gross error than the other.”144 In this period, Strode elicited the sharpest objections from Simonds. For example, on March 18, Strode “having spoken twice before, stood up and spake the 3d time” and said exactly what he had already said twice before. This “made me stand up” and interrupt him because he was violating “the orders of the house” because “having spoken twice before, he now spake the same things again which he ought [not]. So he sat down, and divers laughed.”145 Strode counterattacked. On May 18 he made an effort to get even after Simonds had gone on at length about the various ways that the royal assent to bills from Parliament had in the past been given or denied. In Simonds’s journal, his comment on Strode’s response is in cipher: “Mr. William Strode in a gibing, profane way, comparing records which he understood not nor could therefore value to the Gibeonites’ old bottles and shoes.”146 According to Joshua 9:3–5, 12–13, the inhabitants of Gibeon worked “wilily” by convincing Joshua that they had come from far away because they arrived carrying “wine bottles, old” and wearing “old shoes” and “old garments.” Simonds was undeterred: on June 28, he wrote in his journal that, when he addressed the proposal to deny voting rights to Catholic lords in the upper house, he “nipped Strode.”147 As the slide into war continued, there were moments when he lost heart. On July 1, he wrote in cipher: “I seeing all matters tending to speedy destruction and confusion had no heart to take notes this afternoon.”148 This despairing mood, however, passed. During the king’s siege of Hull, the House passed measures to strengthen its defenses on July 6. Simonds then proposed that a petition be framed to the king saying that if he went “on with his preparations on the one side and tell us not what he expects from us and we go on with our preparations on the other side and show not to his majesty what we desire from him, we may kill one another to the world’s end” without achieving anything but destruction. “The main matter,” he continued, was “the reformation of religion,” and he moved that a committee be established to draft the petition.” Then “the violent spirits diverted” the MPs’ attention to other subjects, but “many gave a public allowance of the proposition I had made by crying out, ‘Well moved.’”149 Additional clashes with the fiery spirits occurred on July 12, 13, 14, and 15.150 the day of humiliation Simonds met his political Waterloo on July 23, 1642, a day that nicely exemplifies Snow and Young’s observation that “the deliberations in St.

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Stephen’s Chapel became more heated and less decorous as the summer progressed.”151 The House was wrestling with the difficult question of how to respond to the king’s proclamation issued in Yorkshire against the implementation of the Parliament’s militia ordinance. On the preceding day, a committee that included Fiennes, Holles, and Marten, had presented a draft of the declaration. It had been introduced on the 22nd by Fiennes, but it was lengthy and had to be continued on the 23rd. In Simonds’s account, the clerk was reading this paper when he was interrupted by other urgent business. After dinner, the reading of what Simonds called “this long, impertinent, and dangerous declaration” was completed, and the “fiery spirits” immediately pressed the speaker to “put the question.” Simonds, “extremely provoked at their unjust and violent proceeding,” stood up and insisted that it was “against the constant order and use of this house” to foreclose debate “before we had given it a second reading and spoken to it by parcels.” Like the Grand Remonstrance and other lengthy declarations, he thought it required an appropriate amount of time and attention. He also pointed out that much of its text was “already printed in a pamphlet of observations,” and should therefore “be well examined and weighed before we pass it.” It would, he asserted, be “very much to the dishonor” of the House if it turned out to be true that the declaration was “already to be had in a published pamphlet and so be taken out of a budget [leather pouch or wallet] or pocket.” Even worse, he added, “in one place it doth lay a scandal upon Queen Elizabeth’s reign.” The pamphlet in question was Henry Parker’s Observations. Snow and Young suspected that the vigor of the reaction against Simonds that followed confirmed a connection between the committee and Parker’s work. Fiennes was a cousin of Parker, who had argued that if the late, great queen’s “goodnesse and Grace [had] been fained, shee might have usurped an uncontroleable arbitrary lawless Empire over us.”152 Simonds, whose admiration of Elizabeth was without bounds, was infuriated by any criticism of her. Unwittingly, Simonds had given his enemies the opportunity to pounce that they had yearned for. “The first fiery tongue that fell upon me,” his journal entry said, was that of William Strode, “a notable profaner of the Scriptures and a man doubtless void of all truth of piety (whose vanity I had several times of late reproved publicly).” Strode accused Simonds of offering “wrong to the committee” that the House had set up by “laying an aspersion upon them.” Strode demanded an explanation. Simonds explained that he had not claimed that the committee had extracted their draft declaration “out of the said printed pamphlet but only that I feared much of it was already there in print.” Therefore the House should care-

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fully examine it before proceeding farther. Despite “the just apology” he felt he had made, “divers of the violent and fiery spirits called upon me to withdraw.” They included Fiennes, Alexander Carew (“my formerly seeming friend”), and Holles (“a proud, ambitious man”), and they “took other frivolous exceptions at what I had said.” Simonds regarded these as “not worth the answering” and decided instead “to withdraw into the committee chamber” despite the fact that Edmund Waller rose and “offered to speak against my withdrawing.” At this fraught moment, Waller was not his only advocate. Others shouted that he should stay, “and some catched at my cloak to stay me.” What happened next, he must have learned from his friends later. After he departed, “these fiery spirits . . . grew ashamed to execute their malice against me to the full.” In his view, they had intended either to imprison him in the Tower or eject him from the House of Commons, “but God who restrained the devil in the case of Job did so far overawe them” that they did not succeed. Strode, Holles, and Marten “did vent their windy wit upon me,” doubtless because he had twitted them “for indiscreet words which deserved a reproof far better than mine.” Instead, the House decided to bring him back to the chamber “to express an acknowledgment in my place for what I had said and that the Speaker should admonish me for it.” He returned and said that he had spoken without any “intention to cast any blemish upon the committee.” If, however, he had erred “in the manner of the delivery” of his opinion, he regretted it and was “very sorry.” He then sat down and put on his hat. “That firebrand Strode” then pronounced his dissatisfaction with the apology because Simonds had not “acknowledged any fault” in what he had actually said. Fiennes, however, parted company with Strode at this point and “very nobly” said that Simonds had “spoken enough to satisfy the house.”153 The final scene of the drama was then performed. Simonds had to stand again and listen to Speaker Lenthall’s admonition. The speaker criticized him for saying something that “might trench upon the actions of a committee.” He added that Simonds’s “great learning and knowledge” made the House take greater umbrage than it would if the words come from another MP. Simonds then sat down and listened silently until the morning session ended at midday. Humiliated, angered, and deeply wounded, he did not return that afternoon. The conclusion of his journal entry for this nightmarish day was a bitter soliloquy in which he tried to make sense of it. “This horrible ingratitude,” it began, “for all my services and injustice towards me proceeding from divers who professed religion made me resolve to leave off further writing and speaking in the house and to come as seldom amongst them as I could, seeing liberty of speech

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was taken away.” He looked forward to being able “to spend my time much better upon my invaluable studies.” Some later offered the excuse that “they did it only to be merry with me.” There were others who told him that his enemies “received more dishonor by questioning” him after he made his apology “than if they had been silent.” He was not appeased and did not speak in the House for over a month after July 23. A sentence that he added later states that he no longer took any notes “in the house but wrote it out of my memory after my coming home to my lodging.”154 The implication is that this was his practice from this point on. Simonds attended for only part of the sessions on the ensuing Monday and Tuesday, and his journal entries were brief. On Monday he wrote that during the time he “stayed in the house,” he “neither spake to any business nor wrote anything in respect of the breach of freedom of Parliament which I suffered in for speaking on Saturday last.”155 On Tuesday, he “withdrew out of the house about 11 . . . and returned not thither” in the morning. That afternoon, the MPs debated their reply to the king’s answer to their recent petition, and their document was “full of asperity and violence; yet the hot fiery spirits prevailing, it passed the house” although attendance was “very thin.”156 On Wednesday, he heard the morning and afternoon fast sermons at St. Margaret’s but did not attend at all on Thursday or Saturday. With the week that began on August 1, he began to attend more, but the journal entries did not resume their former fullness. From July 29 until September 17 his slender reports are all we have, due to the absence of the other diarists or the loss of their notebooks. On Saturday August 6, he described Pym’s leadership in the passing of instructions for military action for the retaking of Portsmouth after Colonel Goring had turned it over to the king. These instructions “tended to no other end but the kindling and promoting of a desperate and dangerous civil war,” but “there was scarce one man” who objected to them. To Simonds it seemed that “all freedom of speech had been lost” after what had happened to him a fortnight before.157 He was there for only part of the morning on September 17, and he was told that after he left “they fell upon great and dangerous disputes.” Pym had argued that it was time to have “a new seal cut to be used and kept by the authority of both houses.” Simonds wrote that some MPs told him that they had wanted to know whether such a step was “warranted by record and therefore wanted my company there.” Still disgruntled, he wrote in his journal that these men should have considered “how undeservedly and ungratefully they had rewarded all my services by their malicious dealing with me on July 23.”158 In John Bruce’s opinion, the rough handling Simonds suffered on July 23 “did much violence to D’Ewes’s self-esteem [and] destroyed for a time

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all his interest in Parliamentary business. Thenceforth he went to the House late, sat there silent and chagrined, and stole away early. In his estimation, all freedom of debate, all chance of accommodation with the King—everything was lost on that fatal Saturday.” From that point on, Bruce thought, Simonds’s journal “became a Jeremiad . . . a sorrowing and fragmentary memorial of the misdeeds of erring profligates, ruined by the rejection of their Mentor.”159 As with some of Bruce’s other judgments, this one contains both insights and overstatements. The final chapter of this book will demonstrate that Simonds soon returned to the tasks he had set himself both as a recorder of parliamentary proceedings and an active MP at least until November 1645, when his parliamentary journal ends. Although he devoted more and more time to his scholarly activities and his young bride, he was by no means a burnt-out case at Westminster. There were too many “moderates” like him still hoping for reconciliation both before and after the Civil War finally began at Edgehill in Warwickshire on October 23, 1642, and he returned to his place by their sides in their struggles against the violenti.

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8

Simonds D’Ewes suffered a drubbing in the House of Commons on July 23, 1642. Although he took it as a crushing setback to his public career, in that same month he was seeking permission to marry a young woman. If his public life afforded him less and less satisfaction during his remaining years, his private life took a sharp turn for the better with his second marriage. Between the start of his service as an MP late in 1640 and July 23, 1642, most of his waking hours from Mondays through Saturdays were spent in the House of Commons. Occasionally, his journal entries mention private pursuits. For example, on January 15, 1642, he noted in cipher that he left the House about 1 p.m. and then “dined and bought MSS.”1 On February 5, 1642, he left the House in the afternoon and went to see his friend Joachimi, who told him the good news of the defeat of one of the Habsburg armies by Protestant forces from Hesse and Weimar.2 Doubtless, there were many shared meals and visits with Joachimi and others that Simonds did not mention. Nevertheless, it is clear that the lion’s share of his time went into the work of the House itself and the journal of its proceedings that he and his assistant were continually “perfecting” in his lodgings.3 After July 1642, he began to devote more time to his family and his “precious studies.” On July 25, he departed from the House at about eleven in the morning but wrote that later that day Sir William Waller, Sir John Potts, and others had spoken “for an accommodation” with the king, “but Mr. Denzil Holles, Mr. Strode, and other fiery spirits would not hear of it.”4 His schedule on the next day was similar and both days provide examples of his new pattern. On July 26, he came in as usual about nine in the morning, but he left around eleven and did not return until three. He did not attend at all on July 28 but recorded that the House had passed a declaration introduced by Denzil Holles that “was full of virulent expressions against the king; yet the injustice I had suffered on Saturday last past discouraged all men

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to speak their consciences freely, so as this declaration passed the house without much debate.”5 Yet this shifting of the balance away from the public and toward the private must not be exaggerated because his parliamentary journal continued to be—even in its somewhat reduced condition—the fullest record that is extant. Except for two moments when he was called upon to respond to something, he made no speeches until November 22. After that, however, he expressed himself more frequently and again became an active participant in the House’s deliberations. Indeed, so ardent was his support of the goals of the “peace party” push for negotiations with the king and against the “fiery spirits” who impeded them that Conrad Russell observed that “unfortunately, D’Ewes reports his own indignation so fully that it is hard to discover the reaction of the rest of the House.”6 This is quite true, but it also tells us how deeply Simonds wanted peace. Yet his thirst for peace did not mean that he wanted peace at any price. He continued to insist that what he called “a thorough reformation of religion” had to occur, but he kept hoping that King Charles would accept it and thereby bring an accommodation within reach. For example, he wrote on March 6, 1643, that in January at Windsor and during the preceding August the king “did secretly intimate that he would consent” to such a reformation if agreement could be reached on the other subjects.7 This meant that at the same time that he was struggling against the fiery spirits in Parliament whose peace terms he rightly perceived were impossible for the king, he was no less at odds with the same kind of men on the other side in the royal headquarters at Oxford. On April 8, 1643, when the talks for the “Oxford treaty” were still alive, Simonds conferred with Henry Rich, earl of Holland, at Westminster. Holland told him that he was among members of the House of Lords who were privately corresponding with some of the peers at Oxford to get the king to grasp the opportunity for a settlement. If he reached out, he and Holland thought that Charles would “find so many sure friends in either House, as those violent Spirits who had raised this unnatural and bloody war would be brought low in the esteem of all men.” However, the king needed to understand that his offers so far were inadequate. Holland and Simonds “both concluded that the violent spirits here and at Oxford would shortly deprive us of all hope of peace.”8 The period following his marriage was largely spent in pursuit of the chimera of bringing an end to the Civil War.

The Wilughby Marriage At least one other MP, Sir John Potts, knew that during July 1642 Simonds had a quite different iron in the fire than his battle against the vi-

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olenti. One of the knights of the shire for Norfolk, Potts disapproved as much as Simonds did of the proposals of those hasty men. In July, Simonds was engaged in a struggle to win the hand of a lady. It is not certain when he met Elizabeth Wilughby, but his courtship of her had probably begun in June and perhaps earlier. Potts knew because he was one of the young lady’s uncles, and he was working to gain the consent of Elizabeth’s father, Sir Henry (Harry) Wilughby, baronet, of Risley in Derbyshire. Elizabeth was fourteen years old and the youngest of his three children, all of them girls. The second, Ann, was married to Sir Thomas Aston (who had represented Cheshire in the Short Parliament), and the first, Katherine, was a spinster. On July 9, 1642, Simonds drafted a letter to Elizabeth’s father. It was not sent, but it reveals that Simonds had been eagerly courting Elizabeth for some weeks at least. The July 9 document looks like a draft that he showed to Potts and Lady Anne Wynne, Elizabeth’s aunt, and they suggested that he expand it along lines to be discussed below. Nevertheless, the draft is a valuable indicator of his hopes at the beginning of what proved to be an arduous campaign. “If,” he wrote, “I cannot without blushing acknowledge my presumption in directing this scribble to yow, vnknowen; then with what words, with what submissions cann I excuse the subject matter of these lines, which is to implore your favour, in vouchsafing mee libertie to addresse the most zealous & earnest affection to your Noble daughter, that euer lodged in an honest heart”? He explained that he was deeply obligated to “the Lady Win, who hath laied a foundation of Hope & Comforte for mee” in this quest. He assured Sir Harry that if his estate was worth ten times its actual value, he would not consider it worthy of Elizabeth, but “that which it is, I shall gladlie prostrate at her foote.” He knew all too well because of his “sadd losse of a rare iewell” how important it was to devote all his “Care, Industrie & Affection” to Elizabeth’s happiness.9 Not until August 1, however, was the concerted effort to win Sir Henry Wilughby’s consent launched. We can only wonder whether Simonds realized that he had reason to thank the “fiery spirits” for freeing up time for him to woo Elizabeth. On that day, Elizabeth wrote from Covent Garden to her sister Lady Ann Aston who was then with their father at Risley. She wanted to inform her sister about a certain matter, “which I may freelie impart to one soe neare mee as yow are without blushing.” She had “by the earnest entreatie and perswasion of my Aunt Win, my Vnkle Pots & other my neare freinds heere” been “perswaded to admitt a Suffolke gentleman to address his affections to mee, & to vse my best endeavours to answeare those desires of his with a liking on my parte.” Ann’s husband, Sir Thomas Aston, had, according to what Elizabeth had been told,

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expressed a desire to meet this gentleman “in respect of his great learning.” Only later did it become apparent that Aston was an enemy. “Aunt Win” was the wife of Sir Richard Wynne of Gwydir and daughter of Sir Francis Darcy of Isleworth in Middlesex, and she was the principal matchmaker at work in this case. Elizabeth told her sister that Simonds had “exprest to mee soe much affection wisedome and piety as I verilie beleeue I shall not onlie be trulie happie in him heere, but that hee will be a cheife meanes to further mee in the way to eternall happines heereafter.” That Elizabeth had experienced a Puritan upbringing like that of Anne Clopton is probable because her father chose Phineas Fletcher as his chaplain at Risley in 1615 and later gave him the rectory at Hilgay in Norfolk. He was described at the time as “an enemy to Ceremonies,” and Bishop Wren suspended Fletcher for his nonconformity. Elizabeth hoped that their “most deare Father would be pleased to make us both happie by his consent.” She expected that he would do so “vpon the seuerall Letters sent to him,” and if he did then Ann could “forbeare to trouble him with these lines.” If he did not yield readily, she asked her sister “to make vse of them as in your owne wisedome yow shall think fitt.”10 Thus did the sisters plot to manipulate their father into consent for what they desired. August 1 was also the day on which Simonds composed another draft letter to Sir Harry. That it was a draft is evident because some lines are crossed out and interlinear insertions added elsewhere in order to increase the missive’s persuasiveness. This version is nearly five times longer than the July 9 draft but contains every sentence from it. Simonds suggested that Sir Harry might enjoy hearing about events in the House of Commons and that he looked forward to regaling him in person about them because “they will make the verie inventions & imaginarie Fables of the poets themselues to blush for shame.” The new material included praise of Elizabeth and her virtues. He wrote of “her rare discretion with other inward endowments, striuing to outstrip Nature it selfe, which hath enriched her with many outward beauties.” He acknowledged that her father might prefer that his eldest daughter marry before Elizabeth, but he felt that Wilughby’s “goodnes and wisedome” would “easilie remoue that scruple” when he reflected that Katherine’s “indisposition” toward marriage might persevere and that Elizabeth might increase his “pretious stoore with severall sweete & blessed Grandchildren.” To mention of Lady Wynne’s encouragement, he added that his suit was “seconded by an vnited concurrence of your Norfolke Allies and kindred, my much honoured & not farr-distant neighbours” (a reference to Sir John Potts). Another new element was his apology for not having made his address to Sir Harry at the very beginning. His excuse was that he had been “guided

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and ledd by the concurrent advice of your nearest freinds heere” and did not want to bother him “with my Letters or Treatie by way of Articles” until he knew that Elizabeth returned his affection.11 But these same people had assured him that Wilughby’s “tender indulgence [was] soe great towards your deare children, that yow would make their free choice, if guided by the advice of their nearest kindred and friends, the cheife cause & ground of your consent.” To assure his prospective father-in-law of his “deare affection” for Elizabeth, he enclosed an inventory of his estate “and Articles proposed for the setling of it.” These, he continued, were not “peremptorie demands” but “submissiue desires onlie” which he left “to your owne noblenes, to doe therin as yow shall please.” Begging “pardon for his tedious and prolix scribble,” Simonds closed by describing himself as Sir Harry’s “most humble Ally & servant.”12 The first we hear from Sir Harry himself is in an early August letter to Lady Anne Wynne. Its presence in Simonds’s papers must mean that she passed it on to him. Wilughby, a man in his sixties and in poor health, was wavering back and forth. He admitted his perplexity about “what to thinke of your loving & kinde letter vnto me” urging him to approve the match. He expressed surprise that she did not prefer to see Katherine wed before Elizabeth, who was three years younger. At the same time, he said that Simonds’s proposal was “so faire as I haue no reason to dissent from it.” Yet in the next sentence he opined that he had “some cause to feare” that Lady Anne had somehow persuaded Elizabeth “to take a lyking of this gentleman beyond her owne free will.” At this moment, Sir Harry wrote, he wanted “to see the gentleman thus much commended by my brother Potts before I giue a full consent to the consummation of the match.” That he was not ready to sign on at this point is evident in his description of himself ahead of his signature as “your desolate and comfortles brother in law.”13 Sir John presumably provided some of the needed assurance, because on August 19 he wrote to Simonds to report that Wilughby intended to come to London “to satisfie himself in all points” of the marriage treaty. “In the meane tyme,” he was “soe well pleased” with what he had learned from the information Potts had provided that Simonds could be told he could continue to press his suit.14 However, Wilughby must also have expressed a wish that Simonds would come to Risley. On August 18, Simonds drafted a long letter to Sir Harry that opens by accentuating the positive: “the good newes which I learned out of your most welcome lines sent to the Lady Wyn renders mee altogether vnable to expresse my thankefullnes to yow.” The problem, however, was that Royalist and Roundhead armies were on the march, and it was not clear when Wilughby could travel safely to London or Simonds to Risley. He

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besought Sir Harry to “consider into what wofull distractions wee are at this time fallen, how thinne the Howse of Commons is and how impossible almost it will bee for me to gett leaue” to leave London. Bending the truth considerably, given his alienation following the bombshell the fiery spirits had dropped on him on July 23, he emphasized his duty as an MP in order to wheedle Sir Harry into permitting the marriage to occur quickly in London. He hinted that he had felt unable to ask for even one day’s leave, “though your inestimable daughter hath begged some play daies for mee.” Some members had been fined as much as £100 “for their meer absence.” The very servants who had delivered Wilughby’s “most welcome letter” had said that he and Elizabeth could not safely make their way to Derbyshire for the wedding.15 After this preface, Simonds introduced what he called his “most humble request” that he and Elizabeth have Sir Harry’s approval “to consummate our happines here privately (in respect of the sad distractions of the publike).” He promised to seize the earliest opportunity to bring Elizabeth and himself to Risley and to do so “without visiting mine owne howse estate or any of my nearest freinds.” The ever helpful Lady Anne had engaged her husband’s brother, “a counsellor of the Inner Temple well knowne to yow,” to complete the legal documents in a fortnight and to make sure that all things needed for the wedding itself were ready even sooner than that. Simonds also requested that Wilughby delegate a servant to tour Stow Hall and the lands around it, and he enclosed a message to his steward there telling him to facilitate the tour. Moreover, he undertook to send copies of his letters to Potts that related “the publike affaires with the addition of such passages as haue happened since the sending away of those Letters.” They contained “many secretts which yow can heare offe no where else, and therfore I pray keepe it to your selfe.” He would also forward “a whole fardle [bundle] of pamphletts” as well as those of his “owne speeches which haue crept into the presse, the meanest of many that I deliuered and fitt to be cast into the fire after halfe an houre lost in reading them; for neither those nor the rest could ever bee of value, seeing I never made one sett or penned speech in the Howse, but most were extemporaneous and sudden.”16 The contrast between the MP who rarely hesitated to take on the fiery spirits in the House of Commons and the suitor who presented himself as a humble suppliant to the father-inlaw he hoped to have is obvious. Despite this deluge of passionate entreaties, Sir Harry withheld his consent for the rest of August. Potts wrote to Simonds on September 2, 1642, with an encouraging but not yet decisive report that Wilughby had told him that he thought Elizabeth “very young & small to coupl[e]” but

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that he was in every other respect “wel pleased & noe backward frend to the match.”17 On September 5, Simonds drafted yet another letter to Wilughby beseeching him to recognize “in what an extreame distraction and vnsetlednes all my occasions both publike and priuate are involved, by the delay of a blessed consummation of this greatest affaire of my life, wherefore it is my most humble suite to yow to make your sweet inestimable daughter and my selfe happie, by one word.” He also committed himself, although it might be “with the hazard of my life,” to obtain permission to travel to Derbyshire.18 Before Wilughby could have received this letter, however, the decision was made. A letter that he wrote to Elizabeth on September 6 shows he had finally yielded to her wishes, although some misgivings remained. “Why how now my little sparke,” he asked her, had her aunt “wrought vppon your London affections” as to make her love “a man so far beyond you in yeares as he may well be your father as almost your grandfather”? Sir Simonds, he wrote, had somehow “bewitcht” her. Nevertheless, Wilughby told Elizabeth he had written to Lady Anne telling her to proceed with the wedding ceremony in or near London. All he asked was that, since “you were borne vppon St Peters day” that it be done on that day. Therefore, he concluded, “in the name of the father the Sonne and holy goast proceede as fast as you can for I am sure you will repent at more leisure, and I my selfe will continew your very ould Dadde.”19 The allusion to St. Peter’s day must have been his little joke, because it was July 9. There is a tale to tell about Wilughby’s allusion to Simonds’s age. A man of forty was, to be sure, no longer young, but neither was he old and feeble. We learn about the source of Sir Harry’s remark from Richard D’Ewes’s letter to his brother from Nottingham on September 8. By an astonishing coincidence, when Richard’s regiment was marching from Lichfield to Nottingham, he passed through Risley. There one of Lady Aston’s servants told him about the impending marriage of Elizabeth and Simonds. Richard then called upon Sir Harry and learned that Ann Aston’s husband, Sir Thomas, had told him that Simonds was “an owlde decrepit man, that yow ware blinde, and deaph, and wondred the owlde knight would cast away his daughter vppon such a man.” Richard then spoke out “before all the Companie, that yow better deserued a Princesse then he a Begger” and that if Aston had been there he would have told him “much more.” Sir Harry then “tooke me by the hand, and towld me hee beeleued what I sayd.” He further said that “Aston was both a knaue, and a Coward, and wished hee had married his Daughter to a Collier” instead. “Deare Brother,” Richard wrote, “no ffreinde yow haue aliue shall more cont[r]ibute to your intents with my prayers, and reall seruice then

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my selfe.” He closed by asking Simonds to “present my vmble seruice” to Elizabeth and expressed his hope that he would “finde reasons to Valewe, and honour hir Equall with hir [who] is gone.”20 It is likely that this letter, perhaps due to the disruptions caused by the movement of troops, took some time to get to London and that Simonds’s outraged letter to Wilughby on the matter was written before his brother’s letter reached him. But Sir Harry himself had written to assure Simonds that he had not been taken in by Aston. In a draft dated September 21 from his new lodgings in Covent Garden, Simonds denounced “that subtle & false whisperer” and “viperous falsifier” who had described him as a man “in decrepit old age.” He thanked Sir Harry for his “happie lines” about the matter, and he reiterated his promise to come to Derbyshire by October 6. He would then resolve “all objections doubts and scruples to you which either the malignitie of man or Devills cann invent against mee.”21 Ironically, Aston was only two years older than Simonds and had married Ann, his second wife, in 1639. The Royalist Aston’s malice should not have been a surprise because on April 19, 1641, Simonds had roundly criticized Sir Thomas in the House of Commons for inflating the number of signers of a petition supporting episcopacy that had been presented from Cheshire.22 Simonds was by then fully committed to the abolition of episcopacy, as Aston probably knew. The marriage of Elizabeth and Simonds took place on Tuesday September 20, fourteen months after Anne’s death, and in a letter to de Laet Simonds said that in his “new, most delightful wife I heartily esteem all those very rare gifts which were in my former wife.”23 After his brother Richard, the next sibling to send congratulations was Grace Bokenham. “Worthy Brother,” she wrote, “I most abundantly reioyce in your so greate and trew happyness . . . how vnexpressable are your pleasures in that quintisenc of all pefecttion which your Dearest lady is misstris of.”24 He was unable to keep his promise to reach Risley by October 6, but on October 11, the Commons granted Simonds “leave to go into the Country & to stay a month.”25 In a Latin letter written at Risley on November 4, he told a friend about the journey. He and Elizabeth went first to the Brograves’ home in Hertfordshire, where they remained for five days. There Elizabeth met his “most sweet daughters, Sissilia and Isolda.” She treated them “with maternal rather than stepmotherly affection, and she in turn was embraced with most tender kisses.” The newlyweds left Albury Lodge on October 27 and reached Risley on the evening of October 30. Sir Harry greeted them with “much joy,” and in the hall “we found the table every day no less elegantly set out (which has been his custom for many years past) than if he were one of the greatest nobles of this kingdom.” They

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had traveled about a hundred miles and slipped between two hostile armies to get there. He quickly burrowed into Sir Harry’s documents to trace Elizabeth’s “most ancient paternal or masculine line.” He found that “her ancestors” had made “marriages with great families.” Her mother, Sir Harry’s first wife, was a Darcy who came from the Norman family of de Arcy that had prospered in the time of William the Conqueror.26 A few days later, he wrote to Abraham Wheelock and mentioned the “great birth, excellent beauty and outstanding gifts of mind” his bride possessed. Moreover, reading the “very ancient autographs” of her lineage gave him “no less pleasure than if I was reading the most ancient Anglo-Saxon annals in manuscript.”27 In mid-November 1642, Simonds returned to his parliamentary duties, having left Elizabeth in Derbyshire. On November 26, Potts’s letter from his estate in Norfolk was addressed to Simonds at Westminster and encouraged him to resume his practice of reporting on “all particulars worthy” of observation from there despite the fact that some “rogues” had recently thrown the “post boy” off his horse. Fortunately, “those letters were after found vnopened & came safe.”28 His bride, writing on November 28, thanked him for his letters and expressed her joy that he had reached London safely. But she was grieved at their parting and was “resolued never to let you go againe . . . tho I want for nothinge . . . yet all doth not content me you being absent.” Having learned about his thirst for news, she reported that they had been told that the king was on his way to Nottingham and would then head for Newcastle in order to meet his queen. But then she heard that the report was erroneous. She also asked him to send her a watch, because “we haue thre clocks but they will none of them goe so that we know how our time passeth.”29 He received a letter from his sister-inlaw Ann Aston, who was also at Risley, on December 3. She said that she could “without flatery, tell you my deare sister hath (in my judgement) made not onely her selfe happy in her blesed choyce: but her friends also . . . your wife laments the absence of her deare husband, & often wishes her selfe with you.”30 If her husband, Sir Thomas, had known of this and similar sentiments she conveyed to her new brother-in-law, he would doubtless have disapproved. On December 10, Simonds wrote again to his wife and began by thanking her for her “vnaccustomed paines and labour in writing to mee weekelie.” Yet her remark that she was “sleepie and wearie” worried him because “health it selfe depends vpon your rest.” Even if she took “a whole weekes time” to respond to his “scribbles,” he would be “the moore obliged” to her. As to her question about engaging a woman servant, he preferred to leave the decision entirely to her.31 Writing on December 18, she told him that the household had been “in some feare of

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plundering” until her father had sent the local leader Sir John Gell “some armes so that now that feare is past.”32 Her devotion to Simonds continued to grow over the years. During a visit to the Brograves in Hertfordshire in August 1643, she began her letter to him with “My most Deare ioy” and told him how glad she was that they would soon be reunited. She had, she claimed, “been very carefull to observe your ruels about exerciseing.” She had also delighted in the “sweet socyety” of “your pritty little daughters” because of the way that their “pritty har[m]les merth” raised her spirits, but she found that “the parting from and loss of there company” did not grieve her as much as “the absence of you.”33

The MP Returns to the Fray Even before his departure for Northamptonshire, Simonds had resumed his participation in the Long Parliament. On August 27, 1642, he spoke in the House of Commons for the first time in over a month. His remarks were brief because he was called upon to give his acceptance of a declaration the House had passed earlier confirming its allegiance to the earl of Essex as the commander of the parliamentary army.34 Throughout August and September, he frequently left the House about 11 a.m. or a bit later and rarely returned in the afternoon. He kept up with what had been done in his absence by conferring with his friends and the clerks, and time and again he expressed his disappointment that overtures from King Charles were repeatedly rejected scornfully. For example, he did not attend at all on September 5, “but perusing the clerk’s Journal the next morning, I found . . . the sad and fatal contempt of the king’s submissive and peaceable message sent to both houses.”35 Instead, he asserted, the fiery spirits insisted on raising their terms far above anything that the king could possibly accept and expelling from the House various members whose nonattendance they took to indicate hostility to their agenda. That Simonds came in for short periods in the mornings on most days may have been his tactic for preventing them from ousting him. On many such mornings, the first order of business was the reading of letters containing news from around the country. Early attendance meant he could stay informed but leave before the discussion of proposals he disliked. On September 9, Simonds arrived at 10 a.m. and heard news he later entered into his journal. The Lords then called for a meeting in the Painted Chamber, which members of both houses could attend in order to “see the Earl of Essex take his leave in triumph of the two houses to go against his distressed sovereign.” Simonds, “having no joy” as he put it, to observe the spectacle, returned to his lodgings and wrote an anguished analysis of the political situation. King Charles, who at this moment had “nothing but

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the name and shadow of his majesty left,” was at Nottingham. He lacked money to pay his servants and soldiers, and many had left him. Those “who yet stuck to him,” one of whom was “my dear and only brother,” were subject “to slaughter and destruction if they fought it out, to punishment if they were taken, or to an ignoble flight if they would save themselves.” In addition, they would “be utterly ruined in their fortunes” because Parliament had decided to pay for the war by seizing and selling their estates. The cost would be staggering, given the fact that the bill for Essex’s officers and soldiers had reached £30,000 per week. Soldiers from both armies were already engaged in “rapine and pillage” in the counties where they were operating, and “the rude multitude in divers counties” had taken advantage “by these civil and intestine broils to plunder and pillage the houses of the nobility, gentry, and others.” The troubles “also gave a stop to all trading almost everywhere and to the payment of rents.” Prince Rupert, the king’s nephew, finding that his troops were unpaid, required the town of Leicester to provide him with £2000 “or else he threatened to fire the town about their ears.” It appeared that “the miseries and calamities of some parts of this kingdom were grown to as great an height as those of Germany itself.”36 As we noticed earlier, Simonds had foreseen the possibility that England would undergo the same kinds of horrors that had torn central Europe to pieces during the Thirty Years’ War, which had begun in 1618 and was not yet ended.37 When Simonds asked himself how it had come to this, his answer reiterated a familiar theme in his thinking. The blame did not lie entirely or even largely on the “fiery spirits,” much as he detested them. Nor did he blame his brother or the other men who had joined the king at York. Rather, the king’s “infelicity was that he did too vehemently and obstinately stick to the wicked prelates and the other the looser and corrupter sort of the clergy of this kingdom.” These men bore the guilt for all England’s sufferings because they “doubtless had a design by the assistance of the Jesuits and the papists” both here and abroad to eradicate “all the power and purity of religion and to have overwhelmed us all in ignorance, superstition, and idolatry.” This was why the Parliament, “with the help of the City of London and other parts of this kingdom,” had resisted the king and acted to “bring about a full and perfect reformation in the church.” Simonds next described (from the clerk’s journal) the earl of Essex’s leave-taking of the Lords and a group of MPs, most of whom were expecting “some set or solemn speech” from their lord general. Instead, and disappointingly, the earl merely stated his willingness to accept the task and wanted “to know what you will please to command me.” He walked into the Court of Wards and was joined by Speaker Lenthall and

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others. There, the earl, “then taking of tobacco did salute them with his hat in one hand and the pipe in the other.” Next he processed “through London . . . with about 300 horse, the trainbands of London standing in the streets, the pikemen on one side and the musketeers on the other . . . to make the solemnity the greater” on his way to the army at Northampton. He “carried along with him his coffin and winding sheet and funeral scutcheons ready drawn” in order to be prepared should he die fighting.38 On September 22, just two days after his wedding, Simonds faced another frontal assault from the fiery spirits. This time, however, he held his ground with considerable aplomb. He learned of a letter read before his arrival that mentioned that his brother had been recruiting soldiers in Staffordshire for the king. Henry Marten, “who had long affected an infamous fame by making fiery and indiscreet motions stood up and desired that I being brother to him that raised men against the Parliament that I might declare what I would do for the defense of the Parliament.” Simonds coolly responded “that perhaps he who spake last might have a brother subject to errors as well as myself.” He said that his efforts to persuade Richard not to enter the king’s service had failed, but neither he nor Marten were responsible “for our brothers’ faults.” In the journal he added that Marten’s brother “was a very debauched spendthriftly fellow.” Simonds promised to announce what financial support he would contribute as soon as he could determine what he could afford. Two of Marten’s equally fiery allies, John Glyn and Sir William Armine, declared Simonds’s answer insufficient. Simonds retorted it was “the duty of every honest man to make no promise of more than he should be able to perform.”39 Since his tenants had not been paying their rents, he requested “liberty for a month or two to retire into the country” to gather his revenues in Suffolk. In the meantime, he offered forty pounds and promised more as soon as he found out how much he could collect. Unsatisfied (and, he suspected, envious because of his “late great marriage” to an heiress), Glyn and Armine “did still undervalue my offer.” Sir Harbottle Grimston and Speaker Lenthall then came to his defense, and the matter ended, albeit without action taken on his request for leave.40 This would not be the last time he would be under fire for his brother’s loyalty to the king, but it demonstrated that he had no intention of yielding meekly to his enemies’ demands. He did not, understandably, mention that he had promised his new father-in-law to visit him as soon as he could get leave, but we should see this exchange as part of his campaign to that end. Simonds’s license to leave for a month finally passed the House on October 11, not least, he asserted, “because some of the fiery spirits were absent.”41 He and Elizabeth had planned to leave London on October 25, but

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they made it October 21 instead. Already on October 7 he had remarked that the committee of safety chaired by Pym that had been established and met in the “2d Inner Court of Wards” told MPs what it wanted them to know and that its members usually had the votes to pass whatever they proposed in the Commons as a whole. As a result, he went to the House “with a sad heart” early in the morning and left early.42 A successful motion on October 15 worried him because it would require men to “declare themselves whether they would contribute . . . money, plate and horses” to the Parliamentary cause. This was, he believed, “most dangerous” because if Parliament “did gain mens purses in a compulsory way they would lose their hearts.”43 Another such “violent motion” made on October 20, Simonds wrote, “made me weary of staying in Westminster,” and he and Elizabeth left the next morning for what was—as indicated above—a joyous vacation in Derbyshire.44 the continuing quest for peace Simonds returned to London on November 18 and went to the House the next morning. He was told that his brother Richard had died in October at Edgehill, the first major battle of the civil war. Staggered by this news, he sat “about an hour after in the House, yet I little regarded what I heard.” He left late in the morning, but by nighttime had learned the report was wrong and that Richard “was alive and safe, for which I blessed God.”45 In the coming months, he took a prominent role in a series of heated debates on the question of whether or not to moderate the two Houses’ terms in order to reach a settlement with the king. In this period, the gap at Westminster between the “peace party” of MPs who pushed for negotiation and the “war party” of men who wanted to yield little was opening up. Simonds was encouraged on November 21 when he saw that Holles, Glyn, and others who had been opposing “an accommodation . . . did now speak earnestly for it.” However, “the violence of Mr. Henry Marten, Mr. Strode and other hot spirits was so great” that the argument continued.46 A day later a motion to call for the disbanding of both armies and a prohibition of plundering by soldiers was discussed, and Marten, Strode, “and too many other violent spirits opposed it.” Simonds spoke spontaneously for the first time since July 23 because he thought the matter “concerned the safety or ruin of the kingdom.” To the objection that such a decision would “disharten our army” while the king’s would “remain entire against us,” he replied that they all knew that they had been unable to raise the money to pay their army and it was likely to dissolve in any case. The same would happen to the king’s forces since the prohibition on plundering would destroy their “hopes of further spoil on which

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they chiefly subsist.” Sadly, the motion failed because “the violent spirits” had “the greater number” of voices.47 Later in the day, Marten delivered several “bold & irreverential expressions” about the king that Solicitor St. John and Sir Henry Mildmay, joined by Simonds, denounced, putting Marten on the defensive. Marten managed to wriggle out of trouble with “a frivolous explanation,” but Simonds enjoyed the opportunity to castigate one of his principal tormentors.48 A major cause of the widening split between the “war” and “peace” parties in London was the insistence of the former on demanding new revenue measures and enforcing them without obtaining the king’s assent. They felt they had no choice because otherwise the monies needed for the Parliament’s army and navy could not be found. A good example of the dilemma arose in the lower house on December 5, 1642. Simonds arrived to find a Committee of the Whole House debating a measure he characterized in his speech as “one of the most fatall and dangerous” yet to be considered. It proposed a parliamentary ordinance that would tax “all men through England to pay towards this unnecessary and destructive civil war the full twentieth part of their yearly revenue in land.” He believed that “this extreame rate” on top of the “many taxes & payments” already established “would be unsupportable,” especially in view of the damage to trade and the collection of rent caused by the war. Moreover, to do this “by a mere Ordinance” of the two houses of Parliament instead of a statute “was a precedent of soe dangerous a consequence as I did fear it would cause great stirs and heart burnings in the Kingdom.” Simonds left and did not return until late in the afternoon, at which point he heard Marten, “whose custom it was to bark at everybody,” say that “all these miseries” were caused by the dilatoriness of the earl of Essex. Another MP agreed, asserting that unless Essex acted quickly “the kingdom would be ruined.” Gerard and others supported Essex, thus setting in motion a long-running debate between Essex’s peace party defenders and his war party critics.49 On December 13, Pym, Strode, and St. John urged as a “public necessity” the passage of a new ordinance which would require Londoners to pay the new 5 percent tax and enable the commissioners deputed to collect it to examine men “upon oath what their estates were.” Simonds then reminded his colleagues of the obloquy that had been heaped on the clergymen who had included the infamous “Etcetera Oath” in their new canons in 1640. Agreeing with another MP that the imposition of an oath required statutory authority, he cited Henry III’s attempt to collect a tallage by sending his officials “into the City of London to examine upon oath contrary to the former accustomed course.” This “raised such a tumult” that the officers had to flee for their lives, forcing the king to with-

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draw it. The House then passed Simonds’s motion to remove the oath provision, “notwithstanding that those two violent spirits” Marten and Wentworth urged its retention.50 When he arrived in the House of Commons early on December 22, Simonds expected a debate on the peace propositions that had been received from the House of Lords. Disappointed that various “diversions” delayed “the great business of the treaty of peace,” he left for a time. Finally, after his return, the clerk read the preamble and the proposals, and Simonds called for discussing them one by one. But several violenti opposed any discussion of them at all. Then young Sir Henry Vane “spake very long & very vehementlie” because he thought that spending time on them would cause a failure to maintain “our own defense.” Simonds’s riposte was his own long and vehement survey of the terrible cost in blood and treasure that the nation had already borne, and he accounted it three times more than Edward III “spent in the conquest of France and five times as much as Henry II spent in the conquest of Ireland.” Yet all that had been achieved was a standoff between the Parliament’s army at Windsor and the king’s forces at Oxford and Reading. These armies had plundered “flourishing towns” and “whole counties of the kingdom have been impoverished & almost desolated” in the process. Two months earlier, he had pledged to give £100 and had done it, but he had not received that much from his tenants since. “And now besides those two woeful attendants of civil war Poverty and Famine which are hastening upon us with winged feet, there are 4 other dreadful clouds which . . . threaten our utter destruction.” First, there was the danger that “the number and potency” of both armies might, as the ancient Romans had learned, cause the overthrow of the established political order and the seizure of power by the armies. Second, “the great and incredible number of poor amongst us” might become so desperate as to “spoil the richer and abler sort” in the manner of the Peasants’ War of 1525 in Germany or the recent rioters in Essex. The moment might be near when “it will be a crime to be rich as it was during the Triumvirate at Rome,” and any landowners who thought themselves “very popular” might gain nothing other than to be plundered last. Third, the English army in Ireland might be forced to retreat to England and be followed by “the rebels of Ireland,” who would then make the English people their “miserable prey.” Fourth, if the Parliament succeeded in bringing the Scottish army into the civil war in England, the Danes and the French might be “called in on the other side” and ultimately “overrun, destroy, and spoil all.”51 Simonds concluded by reminding his colleagues of the “good Counsel” Gaspar, earl of Schomberg, had given to King Henry IV of France, words

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he had already quoted in the House on May 20 and also in a letter to his brother about the nature of civil wars: “So as whosoever had the victory, he was still the loser.” Surely, Simonds claimed, King Charles would “sincerely and plainly treat with us” if both Houses endorsed the peace propositions the Lords had made. “There followed a great Plaudite or approbation” when he finished speaking, “many speaking out aloud, Well moved, well moved.” Strode, Marten, and their allies remained silent, not even questioning “any particular which I had spoken.” Simonds opined that if he had “spoken thus freely & plainly” back on July 23, his enemies would have dispatched him to the Tower. “But many men’s eyes were now opened” to the certainty that “if those violent spirits did still bear sway” and the war continued, “this poor distracted kingdom” was doomed. His motion for the consideration of the peace propositions passed “by many voices.”52 Much work remained to be done before Parliament’s proposals would be sent to the king at Oxford in February 1643, and the negotiations on what became known as “the Oxford treaty” would continue until their final collapse in April. Meanwhile, on December 26, Simonds expressed frustration when an entire morning earmarked for discussion of the peace proposals was “trifled away about trivial business.” When what he considered the important matter was finally broached, it quickly became clear that the “violent spirits” intended to hamstring it by asking needless questions and moving modifications that would make the proposals more difficult for the king to accept. For example, they wanted to lengthen the list of Royalist “delinquents” who would face prosecution, whereas the lords had “with great prudence and moderation” shortened it. Simonds asserted that to require the punishment of “all delinquents” would make “so many men desperate as we must look for no end of these present troubles but by the sword.” He went into the country the next morning.53 His first day back in the House of Commons after his vacation was January 13, 1643, and he was pleased to find that the peace propositions had gained ground during his absence. He pronounced his eagerness to “further that good work to the uttermost of my abilities.”54 An alternation between moments of dejection and of elation followed for him. Two examples suffice to illustrate these moods. When the king’s answer to the proposals was being debated on February 9–11, a complicated discussion ensued over how to disband the armies and establish a “cessation of arms.” Simonds wrote that the “hott spirits” who intended to frustrate the negotiations for peace sought to have the vote on the disbandment precede the vote on the treaty because they could play on fears that it would not be safe to have a truce before it was certain that the disbandment of forces would occur. Against

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them, he argued strongly in favor of opening negotiations on the basis of the proposals. On the next day, the debate continued, and Marten, following his “former custom” of using “some violent expressions,” proclaimed that “if we meant to give way to this treaty we must resolve to serve the Devil.” Simonds spoke next and said that although Marten “had used too many levities to stir up laughter,” this was a time when it was absolutely necessary “for a man to have a plain dealing tongue joined with an honest heart for we are now upon the brink of saving or ruining this distracted kingdom.” To agree with Marten’s argument against negotiating was, he asserted, to agree that “the Devil was a friend to peace” when in fact he was its enemy. When Simonds’s side lost the vote on the question, he noted that he and his allies departed fearing that “the kingdom itself was lost with it.” He understood that “many honest well meaning men gave their Noes; but they were misled by Pym, Hampden, Strode, Martin & other fiery spirits” who put their private interests ahead of everything else. When the MPs then passed a motion for “a treaty upon the propositions after the disbanding,” they called for “an impossibility to which the King could never assent either with his safety or honor.”55 On February 17, Simonds’s dashed hopes soared again when the Lords voted to stick to their original position on the peace proposals while laying out a new timetable for the disbandment of the armies. In the Commons, the “hot spirits” led by Marten opposed the Lords’ plan on the ground that no reasons had been offered for rejecting what the Commons had decided. Simonds, who had attended as Marten had not the conference with the Lords on the matter, contradicted him. The violenti then tried to divert the House by turning it into a Committee of the Whole, but Simonds and his allies blocked this move by a vote of 86–83. Simonds next sought to answer the objection that the king had “many Papists about him” who were advising him against a peace. He urged his fellow MPs to “consider what misapprehensions have enforced his Majesty to make use of their help.” The king undoubtedly feared that the Parliament intended to “deprive him of his ancient, just and undoubted right.” Indeed, Simonds said, “I do conceive his Majesty hath not called the Papists to his assistance out of his affection to them but out of his misapprehension of our intentions towards him.” He remarked admiringly on the speech of Sir John Maynard (“a very able honest man”) who pointed out that they were wrong to think that the king would disband his armies when the proposal left control of the navy and numerous garrisons in the hands of Parliament. The debate lumbered on through the next day, during which Simonds noted with pleasure that Denzil Holles, “who had a long time remained very violent and earnest” for war had changed sides during the previous

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November and “with much integrity and discretion labored ever since for peace.” When the vote on whether to put the question was held, “the noise or sound of them who cried Noe was so great as I verily thought they had carried it.” But in the division that followed, the victory went to the peace party by over twenty votes on a motion to leave the manner of the cessation up to Lord General Essex. Simonds spoke repeatedly in favor of the peace proposals the Lords had made. He refuted the arguments of “the violent men” and stood shoulder to shoulder with “the moderate honest men who desired to save the Kingdom from speedy ruine.” When, for example, the fiery spirits kept insisting on the enforcement of the date that had been set by which the negotiation in Oxford had to end, he reminded them that they had agreed to numerous extensions of the negotiations when the Scottish army had been occupying Newcastle, so it made no sense to “now be so sparing and niggardly of a little time” in order “to save the effusion of Christian blood.”56 But in the end the treaty talks broke down in April, just as the roads were improving enough for the armies to get back to fighting. the death of richard d’ewes The town of Reading lies only thirty-six miles west of London, and MPs decided on April 21, 1643, to require reports on the progress of the siege that Essex had begun there on April 15.57 Lieutenant Colonel Richard D’Ewes was one of the Royalist officers assigned to the defense of the town. Concern about Richard had pervaded the D’Ewes family for months. Sister Jone reported to Simonds on December 7 that Richard had recently written to her and said he was “very well.” He was only eighteen miles away from Busbridge, but she feared for him. “I cannot but trembell euery time I thinke of his danger,” she added, along with a report that she and her husband had had to give “meat and drink and money to content” some sixty Parliamentary troopers and that many of their friends and neighbors had “been plundered” and had left the area.58 On March 28, Jone wrote again to tell Simonds that she had heard from Richard.59 Her husband, Sir William, wrote on April 23: “Our thoughts ar full of heauines for the dangerous Condicyon of o[u]r poore Brother, we heard they haue a purpose suddenly to storme the Towne, god grant it may not cost to[o] much blood.”60 He did not know that Richard had died two days earlier. Richard last wrote to Simonds on March 27 and said in part that “the sadd distractions of these tymes does so possese euery honest hart that theare is not left to me enough to entertaine the thoughts of owre best freindes: which sad condicion I can as properly pretend to as any Man. . . . God opne the harts of the seduced people. & make a happie vnion twixt kinge,

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& subiect. My prayers for your selfe I rest, Your affec: Bro: & Ser. Richard D’Ewes.”61 When Edward Hyde wrote his famous History of the Rebellion, he recalled that Royalist losses during the short siege of Reading were small, but “one man of note, lieutenant colonel D’Ews, a young man of notable courage and vivacity . . . had his leg shot off by a cannon bullet, of which he speedily and very cheerfully died.”62 Simonds never saw these words, but he despised Hyde. When Charles I knighted him and made him not only a privy councillor but the Chancellor of the Exchequer in March, 1643, Simonds wrote that Hyde “was a young utter barrister of the Middle Temple having little law and less honesty [and was] almost wholly given up to profaneness and epicurism and has nothing to set him out but a bold face and a voluble tongue.”63 Simonds inserted into his journal entry for April 21 a report from the minister of St. Mary’s Church in Reading along with other sources which stated that on Tuesday morning, April 18, Richard “was shot with a cannon bullet on the inside of his left thigh which tore away the flesh to the bone but did not break the bone.” The wound was treated by the “best Chrirugions, . . . men of most noted fame and approved skill.” Nevertheless, gangrene set in, and the surgeons told him he should be “sensible of his approaching end.” He received the sacrament at midnight on Thursday, and he applied “himself wholly to prayers and meditation” by having a chapter from the Scriptures read “unto him, which being done he would pray by himselfe alone, then confer with his divine, then bid him read again . . . . Many sweet and pious soliloquies he had, his memory perfect, his speech never failing him but commending his soul into his Saviour’s hands sweetly departed between 7 and 8 on Friday morning.” Simonds wrote that “he died like a true soldier and a pious christian,” and he had the “happiness” to know that God had “fulfilled that speech by his Prophet Esau, he hath taken away the righteous man from the evil to come.” He was buried that night in the north chancel of St. Mary’s. He was twenty-eight years old, and the 160 men he commanded did not want “to serve under any other seeing they had lost him whom they so highly esteemed.” He had maintained “a constant table in Reading,” the liberality of which exceeded that of all the colonels except Sir Arthur Aston, the governor of the town. The soldiers he fed remembered that he had “many times . . . reprove[d] their swearing” and that he took such care “to complete his repentance [that] upon his death bed . . . he gave order for the restitution of a mare to the true owner from whom it been taken by plunder.” He was greatly admired for “his great skill and knowledge in . . . martial affairs,” and he had gained fluency in French and spoke Italian “reasonably well” due to his extensive travels. Yet while abroad, he took

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great care “to preserve himself from all infection of popery.” When the governor of Malta had offered him a knighthood upon the condition that he convert to Catholicism, “he absolutely refused that offer.” The Royalist garrison capitulated on April 26. Simonds wrote of April 21 that “the memory of this siege and of this particular day have been made sad and fatal to mee by the loss of my most dear and only Brother.”64 In his will, he recorded that “I used to look upon [Richard] as a son.”65 Richard’s death continued to reverberate in the House of Commons at least two months after it happened. On May 10, John Gurdon, who represented Ipswich in Suffolk, averred, just as Simonds entered the hall, that the late Richard D’Ewes had at his death left a reversion to some land and four to five thousand pounds in cash in the hands of the wife of his friend Sir Henry Newton, a gentleman “now in arms against the Parliament.” These resources, Gurdon said, should be diverted to the support of the war effort. Simonds found himself called upon by Gurdon and “some violent fellow of his own stamp” to respond, even though Simonds was “newly clad with a sad & mournful habit to shew my inward sorrow for so sad a loss.” He said that he knew nothing of the cash that his brother had allegedly left with the Newtons or anyone else. He acknowledged that Richard’s will made him “sole executor” and that he had proved the will and was working to complete an inventory of Richard’s goods. Therefore nothing his brother had left to him could “justly be taken from me, to whom it belongs by the law of God, the law of Nature & the Law of this Land.” Although, Simonds wrote, “the greater part of the House rested satisfied by what I had said,” Gurdon persevered in his “barbarous inhumanity” and demanded that Simonds “declare what ready money my brother had left” and then laid “filthy aspersions most impudently” on Richard. Simonds then “with much indignation at his foul-mouthed expressions” said that he was “sorry to see a member of the House . . . misinform the House so exceedingly.” He stipulated that Richard had inherited “a great estate” of approximately £4000 but that he had spent most of it during his journeys. Only fifteen shillings in ready money remained. Richard was also owed considerable sums in “desperate debt” that was unlikely ever to be paid to his estate. He had also in his will left £100 “to be distributed amongst the poor” of Stowlangtoft and nearby parishes. He hoped that “the gentleman behind (& I then looked back on the said Gurdon)” would “not take that from his poor neighbors.” The upshot was that Simonds was ordered to provide “an account of what his brother’s estate was,” and he did that on May 12.66 Gurdon and his allies did not, however, give up their vendetta. On June 2, Gurdon “renewed a former foolish motion” and “called out with a loud

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bawling voice” upon Simonds to “bring into the House such moneys” as Richard left him. In his answer, Simonds reminded his colleagues that on May 10 he had been directed to do no more than present the Committee for Sequestration with a copy of Richard’s will and an inventory of his possessions.67 He had provided the will and was compiling the inventory. When it was complete, it would be evident that Horace’s lines applied: parturiunt montes nascetor ridiculus mus (“The mountains will be in labor, and a ridiculous mouse will be brought forth”). At this, “a great part of the House laughed very heartily at the said Gurdon’s folly.” Gurdon stood up and insisted that he “could tell where I had twenty pounds per annum left me by my brother.” Simonds retorted that Gurdon had early claimed that Simonds had received four or five thousand pounds and now he had backed off to a mere twenty. Next Dennis Bond, “another of the Violentados,” tried to “salve his friend Gurdon’s reputation” by demanding that Simonds produce an inventory, to which he said Bond’s memory “did a little fail him” because this had already been ordered and was being prepared. After this, the violenti finally let the matter rest.68 more fiery spirits One of the striking aspects of Simonds’s journal late in 1642 and in the early months of 1643 is the increase in the number of MPs he identified as “fiery” and “violent spirits.” Earlier, Strode and Marten were regularly classified there, and Holles, Fiennes, Rigby, Glyn, Mildmay, and Wentworth made occasional appearances. So did John Gurdon, whom he labeled “a hot, violent, ignorant man” in September 1642.69 The new additions included John Pym, Pym’s stepbrother Francis Rous, Cornelius Holland, Sir John Clotworthy, Sir Henry Vane the younger, Walter Long, and John Hampden. Indeed, on February 17, he described Hampden (formerly seen as an admirable gentleman because of his challenge to the ship money levy in 1637) as “the chief captain and ringleader” of the fiery spirits and as “a subtle fox.”70 On March 10, he wrote that Dennis Bond had become “one of the most violent fiery spirits in the House.”71 He also mentioned that his opinion of Pym had changed drastically. Originally he had “much esteemed” Pym “for that piety I conceived had been in him,” but on March 11 he characterized him as “that insolent proud fiery spirit Mr Pym.” This was because of the way Pym “& his cunning companion Mr. Hampden” had maneuvered “to interrupt the treaty of peace.”72 This is a good example of the “phenomenon of political foreshortening” that J. H. Hexter saw operating in Simonds and many others: “to a conservative in politics a politician of the center will seem much closer to the radicals than he really is.”73 We must therefore remember that when Simonds drew a

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distinction between “the ill party of the House” on the one hand and “the religious and sound men of the House” on the other on March 3, 1641, there was even for him a certain elasticity about which men belonged in each group.74 Simonds’s thirst for peace was so overwhelming that it led him to put among the violenti anyone who opposed it or appeared to do so. On March 30, Simonds condemned the “rash act” the House had approved of sending Marten, Bond, Rigby, Gurdon, and Clotworthy to Queen Henrietta Maria’s chapel in Somerset house to destroy “all the idolatrous pictures & statues” and seize the “vestments, Altar-cloaks, copes & other superstitious relics” it contained. This would, he admitted, have been a good deed if it had been undertaken with the endorsement of the Lords and done “seasonably.” By that word, he meant that doing it “just when a treaty of peace was on foot” with the king was to attempt to sabotage the treaty rather than a necessary iconoclastic act. Marten and his helpers (including Rigby, Bond, and Gurdon) also arrested five Capuchin monks there, another affront especially to the king because their presence was protected by his marriage treaty with his wife’s brother, Louis XIII of France.75 When Gurdon moved the deportation of the Capuchins on April 10, Simonds asserted that he and his fellows, while “pretending great zeale, though some of them had little piety,” had as their main objective sustaining the civil war rather than the service of true religion.76 Simonds confronted Marten at every opportunity. On March 13, Simonds reported that the “fiery spirit & loose liver” Marten argued that Parliament “could make that a crime which had not formerly been a crime” by ordinance, a position that Simonds flatly rejected. He responded that only a statute could “make new crimes capital” or “appoint new ways of trial.”77 When, on April 19, word spread of a bitter altercation between Marten and Algernon Percy, earl of Northumberland, Simonds took great interest in it. Marten had opened and read a letter that the earl had written to his wife from Oxford. In his journal, Simonds wrote that when the earl complained to Marten, the MP “like a currish incivilized untutored fellow” not only offered no excuse but said he was “no whit sorry” and would do it again. Northumberland called him “a base and an unworthy fellow and gave him a sound blow over the head with a staff or a cane.” That afternoon, the House of Commons, Simonds being absent, held that the earl’s action was “a breach of the privilege of the House of Commons” and that “reparation” to Marten was in order. At a conference the next day of members of both houses on the matter, the Lords made clear that they thought it was their privilege that had been breached by Marten’s behavior and called upon the Commons to agree that the Houses should respect each other’s rights. Holles reported this in the Commons,

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and Marten asked that it be discussed in a Committee of the Whole House rather than referred to a committee. That way his fellow “Violentados” would be present to support him. But his request was followed by “a long silence” that Simonds interpreted as an indication of “a great dislike” of Marten’s behavior. He quickly argued against Marten’s desire and moved that the question be referred to a joint committee of both houses. After some debate, his suggestion was “ordered accordingly.”78 An even more striking victory for Simonds over Marten occurred on Saturday, June 3, 1643. Marten and others suspected that there was a locked room in Westminster Abbey that contained “two royal Crowns” and other valuables. Despite the fact that there had been that day “an expresse order of the House” against breaking into the room, Marten had gone there in order to do precisely that. However, Henry Rich, earl of Holland, Denzil Holles, and Simonds went to the abbey to prevent Marten from forcing entry, “and we all observed during their discourse with him he looked as pale as ashes.” On the next day, Marten and the “violent spirits” picked a moment around 1 p.m. when many MPs had left for dinner and managed by a vote of 41–40 to get a motion authorizing their entry. They quickly went off to do the deed before the order could be reversed but found nothing of value in the room. News of this, Simonds noted, stimulated “much discourse” and even “some adhesion of scandal.”79 Simonds was not present on August 16 and so missed the expulsion of Marten from the Commons, but he heard all about it after his return. A radical Puritan preacher, John Saltmarsh had, Simonds wrote, “spoken dangerous words about the extirpating of the king and his race.” During the debate over what punishment Saltmarsh should undergo, Marten “stood up and justified” Saltmarsh’s statements. When others called upon Marten to “explain himself” they assumed he would apologize for his mistake. Instead, he “spake much worse upon his second standing up than before for the extirpating of the royal race and the utter subverting of the monarchical government.” The House sent him to cool his heels in the Tower, where he remained until September 2, and “disabled” him from membership in the Parliament. Had he been present, Simonds would doubtless have been overjoyed, but more than two years later he added his conclusion about what had really happened. The episode was “a mere juggle” because Marten was soon commanding a regiment in the army, and after the New Model Army under Sir Thomas Fairfax defeated Charles I on the battlefield, a new political situation emerged in 1645. Fairfax’s “independent and heretical army” began to arrange the election of men “of their own faction” as MPs. Their goal was “extirpating monarchy and changing the government of this realm.” Henry Marten was one of them, and he

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returned to his place in the Commons in January 1646 despite the fact that “he was generally known to be an atheistical liver and notorious whoremaster.” Simonds even asserted that the main reason for Marten’s ejection in 1643 was “his almost constant opposing and often wittily jerking at old John Pym.”80 peace or war? On June 1, 1643, Simonds reflected on his record of the proceedings of the Long Parliament. In his journal, he noted that he had written “three great Tomes or Volumes of the Journal (though remaining in many places imperfect)” that began on November 3, 1640. The three “Tomes” largely complete, he reflected that he could at this point have ended his labor because he had gone into the House’s chamber “with a sad heart” ever since the “most violent, cruel, unnatural & destructive civil war” started. There had been a series of “almost daily orders, votes & ordinances of both Houses, a kind of necessity now enforcing” the continuation of the struggle. When we consider the amount of time and effort that the keeping of his journal must have required, it is easy to see why he was tempted to end it and turn to more enjoyable tasks. Up to this point, however, he had hoped and through his speeches advocated that “a firm peace” might be established that would “save both England & Ireland.” It had been worthwhile to “transmit not only the story but the very secret workings & machinations of each party as well of the Two Houses of Parliament chiefly led & guided by some few members of either House, as of the King’s party,” because a happy outcome seemed within reach. “Yet now things are grown to that height” after the House of Commons impeached Queen Henrietta Maria for high treason on May 23 “& some other fatal exasperations of either side” that there was no escape from any conclusion “but such as the sword makes.” England would sooner or later “be utterly ruined & myself & family therein.” All that remained to provide him surcease from despair was that his “assurance to a better life” was certain and that “Death how soon soever it come, shall but supply the place of a messenger to me, to bring me into that place, where instead of sin and misery. . . I shall enjoy holiness & happiness forever.”81 Having penned this doleful reflection, Simonds then proceeded to put it behind him and resume his journal keeping without explaining why he resisted the temptation to stop. Whether sheer inertia or his historian’s desire to continue the recording process caused him to carry on is uncertain. Fortunately for us he kept at it until November 1645. On the very next day, June 2, 1643, Simonds found himself playing his accustomed role of mediating tensions between the war party and the

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peace party, but this time the question was between the two houses of Parliament rather than Parliament and the king. For months, the violenti had been arguing that the Parliament ought to create a new Great Seal to replace the one that Lord Keeper Littleton sent to the king at York in mid-May 1642. Strode and Armine made “uncivil expressions” about the Lords and said that if they continued to refuse to concur on the new Seal, the Commons should do it alone. Strode said “that the Lords did but like Lords,” a statement that nettled Simonds, who argued in response that any complaints about the failure of the peers to respond to messages from the Commons should be considered in relation to the numerous failures of the latter to respond to requests from the former. The MPs should not “blame or accuse the Lords of that neglect which we ourselves were guilty of.” He mentioned in particular the details of the peace treaty the upper house had proposed upon which the lower had not acted and reasserted his call for “a blessed & speedy peace.”82 Since the Oxford treaty negotiation had failed in April, Simonds at this point was whistling in the dark. But his hopes were suddenly refreshed when the earl of Essex wrote to the Parliament to propose a new effort at peace talks on July 10. When the earl’s letter was read, Simonds was amused to observe that “Mr. Strode, Sir Peter Wentworth, and some other violent spirits were observed to pluck their hats over their eyes.”83 During the debate on Essex’s proposal the next day, Pym opposed it on the ground that the king had rejected “all our offers of peace.” Simonds, in a long speech, disagreed vigorously. He said that he had thought that “things had grown to so vast an height on either side” that he had no expectation of so much as “the mention of peace so soon again in this house.” The lord general’s letter was as the “digitus Dei” [the finger of God] and “a warning to us from heaven to think in time of saving this kingdom.” He cited several historical examples of the conclusion of civil wars coming about when assisted by “those who commanded the militia in chief.” To Simonds’s disappointment, the House of Lords took Pym’s line and voted by 9 to 7 against Essex’s suggestion. Simonds, who was becoming “ill of a feverish distemper,” left early in the afternoon. His illness worsened, and he proved unable to return until August 2.84 One of the longest accounts of a single day’s activity in the House of Commons in Simonds’s journal is that for Saturday, August 5, 1643. On that day, he arrived late in the morning to find that a conference with the Lords was to occur in the Painted Chamber. He attended it and must have been delighted to hear the speaker of the upper house, the earl of Manchester, present “certain propositions of peace” that the Lords had drafted and were asking for concurrence from the Commons. The preamble explained

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that they were responding to the recent protestation “at which their hearts were much joyed” printed at Oxford in which the king “declared that he would maintain the Protestant religion without any connivance at popery.” Simonds welcomed the propositions as “full of honor, justice, and piety.” Pym then reported on the conference to the MPs, and Simonds urged that the proposals be “read in parcels” and discussed in the usual manner. “Some violent spirits” immediately attempted to divert attention from the peace effort by raising “many frivolous objections.” Fortunately, “divers worthy, honest men spake to the contrary,” and discussion of the proposals followed. When John Gurdon stated that London’s security needed to be fully ensured “before we thought of any peace treaty,” Simonds responded with one of the longest and most heartfelt speeches of his career, and he delivered it “having only written down some fragmentary notes for the help of my memory.”85 The speech reprised arguments and examples he had employed before but also offered new ones. He began, emolliently enough, to say that if the proposal did not embody “a treasure and magazine of safety,” he would “be as ready as any man to reject it.” He then asked the MPs to “consider in what condition we are and what the war is in which we are engaged.” The ancient Romans, after a victory in their various civil wars, “did always forbear to make any oration or triumph upon it because they had imbrued their swords in the blood one of another.” Sadly, it was no longer necessary to “take warning from the desolations which Germany and France have suffered” because the English now had “a full representation of them all in this almost ruined kingdom.” Fields were not being sowed or tilled nor animals reared, “so as what the sword shall leave, we may too justly fear that famine . . . will lick up and devour.” England’s history demonstrated that when kings had oppressed “their subjects in their just rights and liberties, the hand of God was against them” until they “had restored back again those rights and liberties.” Similarly, when the king’s subjects “had encroached” on royal rights, “the same hand of God never left them” until the crown’s “ancient and fundamental rights” were reinstated. The recent successes of the king’s armies might well represent, Simonds suggested, God’s way of granting Charles I “the opportunity not only of ingratiating himself into his people for the present but of eternizing his memory to all future posterity.” He could do this by not exploiting his military advantage and yielding to “the same just, equal, and honorable conditions of peace which he would have done” if the Parliament’s forces had been ascendant.86 Simonds next harked back to the September 7, 1641, fast day sermons by Stephen Marshall and Jeremiah Burroughes at Lincoln’s Inn. He cited their descriptions of the “great things” that God had done for England

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and said that “all those mercies had been conferred upon us in a parliamentary way.” This meant that “we ought . . . once again to settle things by that ancient and undoubted way of acts of parliament.” He concluded with a story from the history of Florence in the time of the Emperor Charles V. The Florentines, at war with the emperor, “sent commissioners to him to treat of peace.” The commissioners, however, were “insidious and faithless men” who upon their return reported falsely that Charles V was poorly prepared to make war. (Any resemblance between these men and the violenti at Westminster was doubtless intended.) This led the Florentines to forget the quest for peace, upon which the imperial army conquered Tuscany and besieged Florence itself. Nevertheless, the violenti in Florence refused to negotiate. When famine ensued, they ordered their garrison’s commander, “Malatesta, a man of incomparable courage and valor,” to use “all his soldiers and all the citizens” to attack the besiegers “and there fight it out to the last man.” Malatesta, however, refused this order, saying that he would not command his men “to be slaughtered like brute beasts” and lose three hundred men for every one of the enemy. He then joined all in the city “who were lovers of peace” to make a treaty “to which those violent spirits were enforced to submit.” Simonds urged his fellow MPs to “open our eyes and lay our hands upon our hearts and without any heat or animosity calmly and rationally proceed with debate of these propositions” to the end “that we may preserve and save this almost destroyed kingdom from that imminent destruction which now hangs over it.” Many of them agreed and shouted “Well moved” and “Very well moved.”87 Nearly three hours of debate followed, and at 4 p.m., John Pym spoke against accepting the Lords’ propositions and even against holding a conference with the Lords to tell them why the Commons would not concur. Simonds wrote that the reasons Pym gave were “light and frivolous and not worthy my mentioning.” This is clearly an instance in which his strong feelings undermined the fulfillment of his self-imposed duty to create a balanced historical record. The men of Pym’s mind wanted to negotiate from a position of military strength rather than weakness and feared the loss of everything the Parliament had gained to this point. This was not an unreasonable concern, especially given what we now know about Charles I’s rigidities. When the House divided, the peace party won by a vote of 94 to 65, and Simonds and his allies “did much rejoice.” The fiery spirits, however, commenced immediately with “their cunning practices” to reverse the decision, and “they brought this work of darkness to pass on Monday next ensuing.”88 Simonds characterized Monday, August 7 as “one of the saddest days” since the Parliament opened. Rumors had

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been spread that day that twenty thousand Irish were on their way to England and that the Commons had in effect voted to capitulate to the king. Several thousand angry demonstrators filled the Old Palace Yard in what turned out to be a successful effort to, as Simonds put it, “overawe the members of the House of Commons” who had voted for the propositions on Saturday night and “to offer affronts and violences” to the peace-party peers who had written them.89 During the afternoon, Pym again criticized the Lords’ proposals, and Simonds defended them while conceding that they needed revision. This time, however, when the House divided, the vote against the propositions was 88 to 81. Simonds wrote that this ended “all our hopes of peace and tranquility for the present and ensadded the hearts of all religious, honest men.”90 The very next day, “a multitude of women” mounted a counterdemonstration outside “the very door of the House of Commons and there cried . . . ‘Peace, peace’” while obstructing the movement of members of both Houses and threatening those who “were enemies of peace.” On August 9, “a great throng of women” continued to call for peace, albeit without any threats to MPs this time. Simonds was appalled when Pym and his allies called in cavalrymen to suppress the women. The troopers “hunted the said women up and down the back Palace Yard and wounded them with their swords and pistols.” Some died of their wounds, whereas the male demonstrators who had on August 5 “offered so much violence” to the peace-minded pears were not punished at all, while “such severe cruelty was used against these women who were only misled by their wicked and unlawful example.”91 horses, taxes, and oaths In his August 7, 1643, speech against Pym’s motion to discontinue discussion of the Lords’ peace proposals, Simonds recalled the way that the wise Romans dealt with opponents by offering “at the same time either peace or war.” The MPs should “weigh and debate these propositions one by one” while remembering that they were no “further off from using force” by doing so.92 This parallels Theodore Roosevelt’s famous injunction to “speak softly and carry a big stick.” It has already been established that Simonds felt strongly that Parliament’s soldiers, mariners, and officers should be paid and supported properly. The real difficulty, of course, was how to raise the revenue to do that. The members of the Long Parliament spent enormous amounts of their time debating what new taxes and other revenue devices ought to be established and how to enforce the collection of them. Simonds had strong opinions on these matters, and he expressed them frequently. As we might expect, a man trained in the common law would dislike the use of martial law in matters involving

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conflict between military men in urgent need of horses and the owners of the horses. He might also desire careful adjudication of the seizure of property belonging to individuals and institutions. A Puritan might dislike the imposition of certain kinds of oaths. A former ship-money sheriff would be acutely aware of the problem of disputes about how taxpayers should be rated and whether the process for rating was fair and balanced. Almost anyone might be reluctant to see the burden of taxation continue to mount steeply, especially when some of the taxes brought with them abuses perpetrated by the officials collecting them. In all of these matters, the prospect for tension between his outlook and that of fiery spirits avid to finance the war effort was high. If any of those individuals appeared to have been lining their own pockets as well, Simonds invariably tried to stop and, if possible, disgrace them. On May 24, 1643, Simonds was in the House and heard complaints about the behavior of a Captain Andrews in Surrey and Hertfordshire who was seizing horses for Essex’s army not only “from such as were papists or persons disaffected to the Parliament” but also from individuals who had contributed generously to the cause and “from poor countrymen who had brought corn to the market.” The House ordered that Andrews be detained and the horses returned to their owners. Simonds delighted in the cashiering of Andrews but related that, having recently returned from the country, he learned that Andrews was not the only such miscreant. In Norfolk and Suffolk, there was “one Captain Po” whose “miscarriages and oppressions” of this kind greatly exceeded those of Andrews. Such “caterpillars did in most places so pillage persons of all ranks and conditions” that they had extracted £200,000 from their victims of which “not one penny came to the hands of the two houses of Parliament or served to pay their armies.”93 On June 1, 1643, Simonds arrived before 10 a.m. to find the House debating an “ordinance for the listings of men’s horses in and about London.” He listened for a while, then left and returned an hour later when the House was debating whether to repeal an ordinance that had authorized Walter Long, MP, to collect the money from the 5 percent tax from his county of Essex. Before this, Long, “a man of a wonderful violent spirit” according to Simonds, had “extremely oppressed that county by raising of horses there” and was continuing to do so. The new ordinance about horses “had been rejected in a full House, and was afterwards cunningly obtruded upon a thin House by Sir Peter Wentworth,” who with his henchman arrived very early for that purpose. They were stymied when it was repealed later that very day.94 Unfortunately, many places were troubled about horseflesh. Simonds noted that on June 20, a debate occurred about how to stop “the unjust

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seizing of men’s horses which was almost everywhere practiced by dishonest officers under the pretense of doing service” to Parliament. People had paid bribes in order to keep their horses, and “more horses were taken than was needful” for military purposes. Indeed, “the very horses of poor farmers” who desperately needed them for plowing and transporting their grain to market were seized, despite the fact that the original ordinance authorized only the taking of “the horses of papists and malignants.”95 The problem did not disappear. Although Simonds was absent on July 18, his journal contained the news that the ordinance for gathering horses from London and Westminster passed.96 In August, Sir Thomas Barrington wrote to the speaker to complain that although he had succeeded in raising five hundred cavalrymen in Essex, “many horses had been taken away violently” in Essex by “one Captain Bennet and his brother.” Another complaint came in at the same time from Hertfordshire where horses had been seized at harvest time. Simonds noted that this item was sent to the committee on which he served “to consider of such as had taken horses unjustly.”97 We here have another example of Simonds’s struggle to defend the rule of law against the demands of “necessity” on the one hand and the depredations of abusers of the law for personal profit on the other. He was not naive and knew quite well that in wartime, especially civil wartime, “the laws are silent” as Cicero had famously written. Still, he felt obligated to do whatever he could to keep the civil war civil and thereby continued to draw fire from the violenti. Although all new taxes were controversial, it is fair to say that the excises introduced at John Pym’s urging by the Long Parliament were in a class by themselves. By the eighteenth century, they would become the mainstay of the new system of public finance that would underlie the creation of the first British empire. Pym had first proposed an excise tax on commodities on March 28, but backed down in the face of vigorous opposition to a call merely for an excise on “superfluous commodities.” This too was rejected, partly because a similar suggestion had been made and voted down in the Parliament of 1614 because of the fear that the “contrivers” of the idea would next try to make “all commodities” subject to the excise.98 Better, it was thought, not to allow the camel’s nose into the tent at all. On June 5, 1643, the House of Commons debated a proposed excise on wine, tobacco, and some other commodities, and it included a provision authorizing the use of the trained bands in its collection if necessary. Simonds took this as an admission that “it could not be collected without violence and force of arms.” This time, the MPs accepted many of the provisions but referred some back to the committee, to no little surprise on Simonds’s part because he wrote that “the very name of excise had been

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execrated and abominated in former Parliaments.”99 When the excise was finally enacted on July 22, Simonds was ill and did not attend, but he had recorded his opinion during a debate on June 23 when he wrote that “a most oppressing and corroding excise” was nothing less than a “calamity” brought upon the nation “by our unnatural, intestine civil war.” Indeed, he continued, since “every morning almost producing some such sad effect, I came for the most part with a sad heart into the house and stayed not long there, being able to do little or no good.” He left about noon and was not present when the ordinance passed the Commons that afternoon. That it was soon established “by an ordinance only of the two houses and not by an act of parliament” made it all the worse in his opinion.100 Alongside the new excise were numerous other revenue devices, such as the sequestration of the property of “delinquents” (meaning virtually anyone who opposed what the Parliament was doing) and the national tax known as the Weekly Assessment, and Simonds disliked and continued to criticize them all. Before yet another expansion of the excise tax was passed on October 8, 1645, he made a speech against its arbitrary nature.101 At critical moments, the fiery spirits resorted to the creation of oaths that all MPs were called upon to swear as a means of weeding out various people who were or were thought to be lukewarm or hostile to their cause of the moment. The oath known as the Protestation had passed the House of Commons on May 3, 1641, during the turmoil over the fate of the earl of Strafford. It committed those who took it to “maintain and defend . . . with my life, power, and estate, the true reformed Protestant religion expressed in the Church of England against all popery and popish innovations” and also to defend “his Majesty’s royal person, honor and estate, as also the power and privilege of parliaments.” Simonds was one of the 270 members of the lower house who took it on that day. He was by no means an enemy to oaths or covenants aimed at binding men together for a good purpose in principle. But he also took them very seriously and came to view them with a jaundiced eye in situations where political manipulation was afoot. Pym, he noted, had on October 20, 1642, called “with very great vehemence & passion” for a committee that would draw up a “new covenant or association” to establish “a more firm bond and union” among MPs. Any who refused to take it could be expelled from the House of Commons. To Simonds’s irritation, “this violent motion took well among the fiery spirits,” because it would increase the number of expulsions of “moderate men” such as himself and thus make it easier for the violenti to have their way. At the time, however, the members of the resulting committee realized “the indiscretion of it” and “let it die of itself and proceeded no further with it.”102

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Unfortunately from Simonds’s point of view, the “new covenant” did not stay dead. On April 10, 1643, he learned that a motion had passed creating a committee to “prepare an Association with an oath or covenant” that the members of both houses would swear, and after that it would be “exacted generally through the kingdom.” He described its purpose as to determine “who were for the two Houses of Parliament, and who were against them.” Most of the advocates of this scheme were “the violent spirits,” but Simonds was pleased that the committee included John Selden, “who abhorred this course.”103 He had first met the famous lawyer, linguist, and scholar on September 24, 1624, at Sir Robert Cotton’s house. In his autobiography, he expressed admiration for Selden’s “deep knowledge and almost incomparable learning,” yet he also called him “a man exceedingly puffed up with the apprehension of his own abilities.”104 As we shall see, he found himself agreeing with Selden frequently as the Long Parliament lengthened. When, on April 27, young Vane moved that a committee be established with powers to remove “obstructions” to the acquisition of a loan from the City to pay the army, Simonds immediately suspected that this leverage would be used to press the MPs to “enter into a new oath or covenant.” Indeed, he thought the entire maneuver had been planned by “the fiery spirits in the City of London” and men “of the same leaven in the House.”105 The wind behind their fire gained velocity on April 28 when Sir Henry Mildmay called for the covenant “which had been formerly promised them . . . divers in the hall cried out ‘A covenant,’ ‘A covenant.’” Mildmay “with much vehemency” wanted it put in place quickly so that “we might distinguish the chaff from the wheat, with some other foolish expressions.” For Simonds, however, Mildmay failed to consider “what a dangerous and ungodly snare this new unnecessary” oath would mean for “consciences better steered with piety than his own.”106 It might cause the defection or at least the withdrawal of “moderate men” whose departure would retard the transcendently important part of the Parliament’s cause—the reformation of religion. Doubtless Mildmay and others like him were pleased when the furore over Waller’s plot gave Pym the opening he needed to obtain the passage “the Vow and Covenant” by the Commons on June 6.107 Quite soon, however, the desperate need to bring the Scottish army in on Parliament’s side led to the elaboration of yet another oath. The Parliamentary commissioners in Scotland who were negotiating a military alliance wrote that success was within reach if Parliament committed to paying the Scottish troops and to signing on to the “new covenant.” In his journal, Simonds wrote that “the chief thing it drove at was to have the episcopal government in England clean abolished and the presbyterial

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government established in England as well as Scotland.” Simonds first spoke on this subject on August 26, 1643. He argued that the clause in the covenant that said “we should reform the Church of England according to the word of God and the example of the best reformed churches” was “very strange.” This was because it required conceding that the Scottish kirk was already so reformed, “whereas scarce any of us knew what government was there established.” For someone who took oaths with utmost seriousness, nothing could be sworn unless its meaning was crystal clear. It was therefore essential that “the whole platform of their church discipline” had to be provided before a decision on the oath could be made. That reservation stated, he delighted in the clauses “for the suppressing of sin and wickedness” and the extirpation of “heresies and errors.” He was “very glad,” as he put it, “that we would now at last look upon great and notorious sinners with a severe eye, seeing swearing, drinking, and especially whoring” had been increasing since 1640. With respect to heresies, however, he specified that he meant that “we did rather provide for the destroying of them than the persons that held them.”108 The author of The Primitive Practise for Preserving Truth could say no less. The “Scottish covenant,” as Simonds characterized it, came up for debate again on September 1, 1643. The day before, the Westminster Assembly had suggested the addition of the phrase “according to the word of God,” and the House of Commons agreed. But the question was whether to insert this phrase “in the body of the covenant” or to make it a marginal note as the assembly of divines had suggested. Simonds moved that the words “so far as we conceive it to be according to the word of God” be added to the text of the oath itself. Pym argued that, since this was an adverbial expression, it should remain in the margin. Simonds demurred, for he was afraid that the words if they appeared only in the margin would be “like a pardon that comes after a man’s head is cut off.”109 Modern readers at this point might be astonished. There was a civil war on, and the Commons was spending valuable time deciding whether a phrase belonged in the oath or as a marginal note to the oath. Adverb or participle? Yet the outcome of the war depended this debate. If the MPs rejected what soon became known as the Solemn League and Covenant with the Scots, the Parliament’s forces in the north might well have gone down to defeat because the king’s army there under the duke of Newcastle was gaining ground. The decision to accept the Scots’ terms shifted the military balance against the king in 1644. As we have seen, Simonds was an admirer of the Scots and their religious reformation, and he said in his speech that “the discipline of the Church of Scotland” was “the exactest and best in the Christian world.”

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But he also asserted that “no discipline of that church or any other church in the world” could be discovered except “analogically, proportionably, and by inference.” The covenant under discussion had to be reworded in certain particulars in order to make it appropriate in England. For one thing, it mentioned only “the noblemen, knights, and the rest of the Church of Scotland,” and so to be used in England “the reformation of the Church of England” required mention as well. Without appropriate changes, including his suggested additional phrase, “we shall otherwise sin greatly in swearing.”110 Nevertheless, the violenti, seeing they had the voices to carry the first article of the covenant and Pym’s motion about a marginal insertion, “would not yield one hair to the scruples of other men.” Indeed, it passed without a division, and Simonds left the House soon afterward despite the fact that the debate on the other articles of the covenant continued. He did so because he considered it “to little purpose to stay or speak because the violent spirits had the advantage of voices to carry what they listed.” The great irony, however, was that “most of these men in 1647, being heads of an independent faction, proved the greatest enemies to the whole covenant.” This phrase, of course, he inserted much later by squeezing it into his text.111 On September 25 at St. Margaret’s, Simonds was among many MPs and the members of the Westminster Assembly who swore the Solemn League and Covenant. He gave his clear opinion of it on November 6 when three MPs, including Suffolk’s Sir Philip Parker, were called upon to take it and said that they could not. They were sent to the committee chamber, and Sir Anthony Irby—to the astonishment “of all sober-minded men”—moved for their expulsion from the House, imprisonment, and seizure of their estates. Simonds was then pleasantly surprised to find that Walter Long, Cornelius Holland, and some other violent spirits advocated suspension from the House but not expulsion. For himself, “though I did myself take this covenant, . . . conceiving it to be the chief means under heaven for the preserving of the outward happiness of this kingdom, . . . yet my judgment cannot be the rule of another man’s conscience.” He therefore urged that the three be merely suspended rather than subjected to “so heavy a censure” and that every effort be made to persuade them to change their minds. The House ultimately decided on suspension and no more.112 Like so many issues, this one did not disappear either. On August 10, 1644, Sir Henry Mildmay “to get applause spake violently” to expel any members who had not taken the covenant. Strode seconded him, and Simonds and several others opposed him.113

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a presbyterian church of england? When the Assembly of Divines finally convened on Saturday, July 1, 1643, in the Henry VII chapel in Westminster Abbey, Simonds was present. He heard the sermon by Dr. William Twisse, a Puritan preacher and scholar who had served as a chaplain to the Queen of Bohemia early in his career. Although Twisse was the prolocutor of the assembly, his sermon was, Simonds thought, “very mean and ordinary.”114 However inauspicious its beginning, he hoped that the synod would lead the way to the “reformation of religion” that he had always seen as England’s only way out of the bloody abyss of civil war. On September 12, 1643, he was present in the House of Commons when a letter from the assembly of the Scottish kirk was forwarded to the MPs by the divines at Westminster and read by the clerk. It expressed the Scots’ desire “that true religion might be settled here in the purity of the ordinances and according to the best discipline of the reformed churches that so there might be a more dear and near union between us.” “I confess,” Simonds wrote, the words “were so pathetical as they drew hot tears or tears of joy from my eyes.” Additional news that morning was of the Scottish commitment to field an army of ten thousand foot and a thousand horse so long as they would be paid by the Parliament. Simonds and his fellow MPs voted overwhelmingly to do this, but, as usual, he worried about how the money would be obtained.115 Simonds occasionally attended the proceedings of the Assembly of Divines in order to listen to the discussions. On February 19, 1644, for example, he left the House of Commons a little before 11 a.m. and spent two hours listening to “Mr Gataker, an aged divine, and Mr. Vines, a young man, speak admirably touching the government of the church by presbyters and a presbytery.”116 Like most of the clergymen in the assembly, Simonds was greatly troubled by the efflorescence of antinomian and Anabaptist opinions, and on November 4, 1644, he was in the House during a debate on a motion that “no man should expound the scripture in any church, chapel, or house but an allowed and approved minister.” Simonds began his speech by remarking that he assumed that the committee members who had made this motion did not intend “to debar masters of families to repeat a sermon or expound a chapter to their own families,” even though “in the bishops’ times” this was proscribed. “I have studied too long,” he continued, “to favor schismatics or sectaries . . . but this I know, that the persecuting church is the malignant church and the persecuted church maintains the truth.” He supported some restraints on public preaching but insisted that there should be no “intermeddling at all with anything done in private houses.”117

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From the closing months of 1643 until Simonds ceased adding to his journal of the Long Parliament in November 1645, his entries tend to be shorter than before. This was partly because he attended less assiduously, coming in later and leaving earlier and occasionally staying away altogether. This should not surprise us given his frustration with the ability of the war party men to pass whatever they pleased, regardless of the arguments of the men Simonds described with words like “sober,” “honest,” and “moderate.” For example, he was not present on Wednesday September 20, 1643, and on the following day recorded that he “was still absent from the House, having taken an occasion to ride into the country for two or three days to take the fresh air.”118 That said, he continued taking close interest in certain matters, one of which was religious reform, and to speak in and report on the debates on these topics as fully as before. Although he appears to have been initially open to a presbyterian replacement for episcopacy, by the early months of 1645 Simonds had become an enemy of key components of the plan for church government that the majority in the Assembly of Divines favored. Like other Puritans, he had as we have seen long been a bitter opponent of the claim made by many Arminians that church government by bishops was divinely ordained (jure divino). When the Westminster Assembly proposed that the presbyterian church order was divinely ordained and should be put in place in England as it already was in Scotland, Simonds and many other Parliamentarians balked. He went so far as to publish his argument against it—his Primitive Practise for Preserving Truth—in June 1645. Although the dispute about this issue in London did not boil over until 1645, it began simmering early in 1644.119 On March 25, 1644, Cornelius Burges presented to Parliament a document describing the assembly’s conclusions about the issue of excommunication, and it is essential to remember that the power to excommunicate is the power to exclude from participation in the Eucharist. Although both the divines in the synod and the peers and MPs agreed that ignorant and scandalous persons should be excluded, agreement about how to achieve that proved elusive. In Scotland, the clerics had the power to distinguish between the sheep and the goats for this purpose. In his journal, Simonds wrote that the assembly’s “paper” answered the question the MPs had asked about the precise “limits of ignorance and scandal for which they would have men put from the sacrament.” The answer defined ignorance as “the not knowing of the principles of Christian religion and for scandalous sins.” The clerics further characterized scandal as “such notorious sinners as are mentioned in several parts and places of Scripture . . . as whoremongers, drunkards, etc.” Who, then, would determine exactly

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which members of the congregation failed to get over this bar? According to Simonds, the report from the assembly said that the minister and elders in each parish should have power to make this “the trial and judgment.”120 When the MPs took the matter up two days later, Simonds noted that there had been agreement that “a competent knowledge touching the 3 persons of the Trinity” should be required of any person who would be allowed to receive the sacrament. But the House also insisted that the Westminster divines should identify exactly “the very particulars in which this should consist.”121 So far in the debate about admission to the sacrament, Simonds had remained silent, but as he well knew the difficult question about where the authority to deny access to the sacrament should reside remained unresolved and carried great importance. On March 6, 1645, a group of members of the Westminster Assembly came to the House of Commons to convey a request. Since “Easter now drew near,” the divines asked the MPs to authorize “that the minister and some other godly and well-affected of the parish” be authorized to exclude “the profane, scandalous, and ignorant” from the Lord’s Supper. After the clerics left, Simonds noted that “Mr Selden very excellently showed that this . . . was a vast power” that the clergy had not exercised even “in the time of popery itself” and that nothing in the Scripture warranted their doing so. Churchmen were indeed obligated to beseech their parishioners “to examine themselves and to abstain if not fit,” but they could go no further.122 Stephen Marshall and others from the assembly presented a statement on March 29 that, according to Simonds, “gave little satisfaction” because it placed “an arbitrary power in the minister” to exclude people.123 Men trained in the English common law bristled against rulings for which there was no appeal. It should be recalled here that Simonds had always been a staunch opponent of permitting churchmen to hold justiceships of the peace or otherwise play magisterial roles because such tasks would distract them from their preaching and pastoral duties and even corrupt them. How could he, as a parishioner at St. George, Stowlangtoft subjected to the less than tender ministration of Richard Damport, have thought otherwise? On April 21, he spoke to support a requirement that no one be denied the sacrament on the ground that he was guilty of “scandalous crimes” unless the minister and elders had examined the accused and heard his statement. “If ever I should be thus accused,” he asserted, “though never so falsely, I would be loath to receive till I had cleared myself.”124 When he arrived in the House on April 24, 1645, Simonds found his colleagues “very earnest in debate” as a Committee of the Whole House about whether an individual’s fitness for the sacrament should “be exam-

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ined by the minister and eldership of every parish or by some justice of the peace or other lay magistrate.” In his remarks, he summarized the position of those who advocated the former as founded on the assumption that without this power “our settling the government of the presbytery would be enervated and come to nothing.” This was to take the Scottish or “Melvillian” rather than the Erastian line on this critical point, and Simonds, like Selden, was no Melvillian.125 He intervened three times in the debate. First, he said that religious reformation could not succeed if the minister had to spend his time adjudicating cases for admission to the sacrament. Churchmen, he insisted—not for the first time—ought to be straining every sinew “to study and preach . . . and no minister that can either construe Latin or read Greek would desire” to have magisterial responsibility. To make him a judge as well would mean that he would have “no time to study and preach.” Simonds reminded his colleagues that they had already passed a statute excluding divines, including masters of Oxford and Cambridge colleges, from serving as justices of the peace. Yet to make them judges of fitness for the Eucharist would be to “make every minister an examiner of these capital and criminal offences.”126 The implication here is that “common fame” in the parish as reported by gossips might lead to the exclusion of an innocent person. Guilt or innocence was the business of lay magistrates, not ministers and elders. This was to go beyond the position he had taken on March 6 and been willing to leave the decision to the minister and elders. When the debate continued a week later, Simonds presented the case of a man he knew, Captain Betts, who “was questioned at Newgate sessions for taking a silver cup out of a tavern.” Servants at the tavern swore that Betts was guilty, but “it proved false” because the defendant brought “several witnesses of credit” who testified that he was elsewhere “that afternoon in which they pretended the cup was stolen.”127 To the important objection that all those who had sworn the Solemn League and Covenant that had cemented the alliance between the Scots and the Parliamentarians in 1643 had promised to establish jure divino Presbyterianism in England, Simonds answered that the vow should be fulfilled “according to the word of God that ministers fulfill their cure only.” After all, the Scots had already “altered many particulars . . . in pursuit of the new directory” of worship, and thus “their usages are not infallible rules.” His central argument was that to “put this new power and secular employment upon ministers” was to “destroy our own work of reformation.” England had a long tradition of limiting “the clergy’s intermeddling with lay causes and crimes” that should be continued. Simonds, although called to the bar as a common lawyer, had never practiced law.

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Yet he retained the mindset that six years of study at the Middle Temple had instilled in him. His prejudice against clerical invasion of secular legal processes was ineradicable. In addition, he pointed out, in the parish of St. Margaret’s Westminster, the church attended by most members of the House of Commons, there were “thousands of communicants.” In such parishes, a “minister’s life” was “too short to hear and examine scandals” that belonged properly to a civil judge.128 He spoke yet again on this subject on October 3, saying that to give clergymen this “unlimited power” would cause “infinite oppression upon the consciences and quiet” of the laity in England and an increase “of pride, tyranny, and insolency in the clergy.” Simonds doubtless spoke from his bitter personal experience of Damport’s abuse, and he added that “in every parish” there would be different standards “for scandals according to the humors and fancies of men.”129 In what sense then, if any, was Simonds D’Ewes a “Presbyterian,” as many historians have thought? Robert Ashton, for example, described him as “that crashing Presybyterian bore” who urged in June 1648 that “Parliament had little choice but to trust the king.” Ashton was right that Simonds was a “political Presbyterian” in the sense that he was a peace-party MP who opposed the “political Independents” and the New Model Army’s terms for a political settlement with the king. He had, after all, longed for settlement from the beginning. But Simonds was not a religious Presbyterian.130 He published his Primitive Practise for Preserving Truth in June 1645, a tract he had written to oppose Laudian clericalism in 1637 and been unable to publish because of the licensing of the press overseen by William Juxon, Laud’s client and the bishop of London. Simonds’s publisher was Richard Overton, a man about to make his mark as a printer of Leveller manifestos and tracts. The record does not reveal whether Simonds knew how radically minded Overton was, and nothing in Simonds’s subsequent political behavior suggests that he had become a friend to either Independents or Levellers. That said, his Primitive Practise proves that he was an enemy of clerical pretensions to power from either the Laudian or the Presbyterian direction. Insofar as Presbyterianism countenanced lay involvement in religious decision-making, Simonds was sympathetic. Indeed, a major part of his objection to the Laudians was their unwillingness to allow any leeway to “tender consciences” (such as his) on the mandating of surplices and other ecclesiastical vestments, bowing at the name of Jesus, elevation and railing of communion tables, and the like. Their rigidity had driven far too many godly preachers and settlers into the “howling wilderness” of Massachusetts and led Simonds to consider exile there for himself and his family. But the “new clericalism” of the Scots, with its placement of

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decisions about admission to the Eucharist in the hands of the clergy, was wholly unacceptable to him. Both in print and in the House of Commons, Simonds resisted the introduction of a “Scottish presbytery” in England in 1645. He did so when the pressure for it was at its peak and thus unintentionally helped to keep the door open to Independency. Moreover, when the question of establishing the assembly’s liturgy, the Directory for Public Worship, was debated on May 31, Simonds vigorously opposed its provision that any who “should write, speak, or preach against the directory” should upon their third offense undergo lifelong imprisonment. There might be flaws in the directory, but these would not be discovered or corrected if no one could “write, preach, or speak against them.” Reprising the theme of his Primitive Practise, he said that in the early Church, the “uttermost punishment of heretics” was banishment. This provision would punish people “both orthodox and godly for that which concerned mere matter of discipline. The truth will prevail of itself and need not be stablished with such rigorous punishment.” Popes and Turks used such harsh methods, but “we hope we shall never come to establish the truth itself by such means.”131 For Simonds, the church was too important to be entrusted to the clergy alone. preachers and pulpits When Paul D’Ewes died in 1631, his estate included the advowsons for the parishes of Stowlangtoft and Lavenham. In this examination of Simonds’s ecclesiastical patronage at the parochial level in the 1640s, we will begin with the rectory of St. George Stowlangtoft. In preceding chapters, we have seen that the relationship between Simonds and Richard Damport, the rector of Stowlangtoft installed in that post by Paul D’Ewes, consisted of lengthy periods of angry words alternating with briefer periods of nervous amity. Simonds put soteriological and liturgical matters above all else where religion was concerned, at least until forced to confront the question of church government in 1644 and 1645. An interesting aspect of his many criticisms of Damport’s behavior and preaching is the absence of theological content. Simonds never held back from flinging out ferocious denunciations of Arminians and what he called “altar-adorers” such as Archbishop Laud and Bishop Wren, but he never put Damport—for all his manifold failings—in their camp. Further evidence that Damport was not seen by the “godly brethren” as part of the Laudian party appears in a letter from the eminent Puritan preacher Edmund Calamy in nearby Bury St. Edmunds dated November 22, 1639. Calamy urged Simonds to act as a peacemaker in a quarrel that had arisen between Damport and a parishioner.132 In 1634, his relations with Damport had taken a surprising turn

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for the better. He wrote that he was on the verge once again of leaving his beloved Stow Hall and resettling his family elsewhere because of the rector’s abuse of him when—rather suddenly—peace broke out between the two men on November 5, 1634.133 He hinted that Damport might have come to the realization that his parishioners would be angry if the D’Ewes household and its generosity to the local poor moved away again. So, as Simonds put it, Damport turned about and “offered peace & respectfull obseruance vnto us” because of the obloquy he would bring down upon himself in his flock if the D’Ewes departed.134 Simonds never forgot Damport’s offenses, however, and there were indeed some new ones even after the shaky 1634 rapprochement. That the “old Damport” still reared his head occasionally is evident from Simonds’s Latin letter to him of January 25, 1639, which begins “hardly had the seal of [your] letter been torn away when my hair stands up because my innocence is mangled by you with jeers, for the most part bitter. To pile abusive words on top of abusive words is not Christian.” He accused Damport of believing the malicious charges of a local woman who had denounced Simonds but had been doing the same thing against Damport for the previous eight years.135 Writing from London on May 30, he again twitted his rector for taking “the barkings of a lying little old woman” seriously, but his salutation to Damport as a “grave gentleman” suggested that the cleric’s answer to the first letter was satisfactory. Simonds assured the rector that “no mortal more truly rejoices at your happy marriage, . . . let us be especially vigilant for our mutual duties and for the good and peace of the inhabitants [of Stowlangtoft] where nearness has joined us together. Thus hopes and thus vows Simonds D’Ewes, most friendly to you.”136 When Lady Anne D’Ewes died of smallpox in July 1641 and Simonds was bereft to the point of madness, Damport wrote very sympathetically to his patron and responded with alacrity to Simonds’s instructions about funeral arrangements for her.137 At some point after that, Damport left Stowlangtoft for another benefice he had long held, Feltwell in Norfolk—albeit without resigning Stowlangtoft until 1644. When the news of his resignation reached Simonds on April 4, 1644, he exulted in his Latin diary, “thus God had freed me from that pest!”138 His choice of a successor was George Speed, to whom he wrote in Latin on June 7, 1644, and said that “for ten whole years” after his father’s death, Damport had “imposed upon me . . . almost innumerable troubles and expenses, or sometimes, in a most proud way, an uncertain and faithless peace.” 139 This suggests that Damport moved to Norfolk in 1641. We know from Simonds’s sharp criticism of Edmund Cartwright that he disliked clergymen who held more than one benefice.140

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By late in 1643 Damport had to defend himself from the wrath of some of his parishioners who had complained of him to the Suffolk committee that was receiving reports about allegedly “scandalous ministers.”141 The complaints had been sent to Parliament’s Committee for Plundered Ministers, and Damport clearly hoped for help from his former patron. Early in 1644, he sent Simonds a letter bewailing his troubles. It began by representing the “reproaches of malicious men” that he had suffered as the lying charges of those who had also slandered Simonds himself. The “G. Wright” who had attacked Damport had also “snibb’d” Simonds for permitting what Wright called Damport’s “abusive wast and spoyle of ye gleabe & ye appurtenances.” This same scoundrel had also used “dishonourable and base language” when he “blasted the fame of your noble Brother.” Wright, “that drunken sott Witherby,” and various other local malcontents Damport named had somehow “tickled Sir W[illiam] Springs eare” and convinced him to join the complaint about Damport. After a detailed defense of his management of the glebe lands at Stowlangtoft, he requested Simonds’s help before the Committee for Plundered Ministers in London.142 In his Latin diary, Simonds recorded on June 5 that he had received a vernacular letter from Damport, “a wicked and unworthy man.” Nevertheless, on July 19 he made his way to the committee, which was chaired by his fellow MP, John White, and there requited Damport “good for evil.”143 His July 25 letter to Damport described his attendance at that meeting. He had sat at the right hand of its chairman and defended Damport successfully by pointing out that he had resigned his Stowlangtoft benefice, thereby enabling Simonds to replace him with “a most worthy pastor.” Being Simonds, he was unable to resist preaching to the now struggling Damport about how he must, having been through his patron’s efforts saved from deprivation, now fulfill expectations of his “future industry in preaching, innocence in living and gravity of morals.” Moreover, the MP continued, Damport should refrain from exercising “private revenges and hatreds in future in the public office of preaching and in the administration of the divine meal, which I know from repeated deadly experience was most customary with you.”144 Simonds had a way of doing good works that must have made it difficult for the beneficiaries to be unfeignedly grateful. On October 4, apologizing for his tardiness and pleading illness, Damport, in flowery Latin, acknowledged that he owed Simonds “perpetual thanks” for his “sublime” and “noble” act of defending him when he was in danger of being “convicted without a hearing.” Although he did not quite admit that he had behaved badly, he promised to take to heart the advice “regarding the pastoral office, that revenge is . . . to be curbed.”145 On January 29, 1645, Simonds wrote his final letter to

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Damport. He admitted that although he had been “quite sharp in warning and advising” his former incumbent, he was pleased that Damport’s response showed “great candour and signs of a grateful spirit” rather than what he had feared might come—“the bile of your mind in a prickly style.” Gratified to see that the minister’s troubles had produced “a happy change” in his behavior, he praised the “benevolence” in Damport’s last letter and promised that he would not forget it.146 Fortunately for Simonds, the tense and painful relationship with Damport had no parallel at Lavenham. Henry Copinger had been the rector from 1578 to 1622, and he had been succeeded by his son Ambrose. Ambrose, it should be remembered, had preached the funeral sermon for Paul D’Ewes at Stowlangtoft in 1631. Ambrose died in 1644, and his successor, William Gurnall, may have served in Lavenham as Ambrose’s curate for a time, although this is uncertain. Gurnall, who had been baptized in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, in 1616, went to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1632 and graduated BA in 1635 and MA in 1639. He would later gain fame as the author of a popular treatise, The Christian in Compleat Armour.147 It appears on Ian Green’s list of “best-sellers and steady sellers first published in England” between 1536 and 1700, and—at over two thousand pages—it is the longest work to make the list. In these many pages, Green writes, Gurnall labored to “tease out every last military simile and metaphor” from Ephesians 6:10–20 (about “the saints’ war against the devil”).148 Although there is no evidence that Simonds heard or read any of the sermons that constituted the book, the theme would certainly have appealed to him, and there is no doubt that he admired Gurnall. Simonds’s friend and fellow Suffolk antiquarian and Puritan, Robert Ryece, lived at Preston, which is less than two miles from Lavenham. Ryece wrote that Simonds “freely and very willingly gaue the Rectory unto Mr. Wm Gurnall, now Incumbent there [1655], although to him then unknowne, at the request of the parish, which hath beene much for the benefit of the Towne many wayes.”149 Simonds’s Latin diary and the Latin letters he exchanged with Gurnall provide valuable details. On July 1, 1644, he wrote in the diary that Stephen Marshall had informed him that “one Gurnall was exercising the ministry of a preacher at Sudbury” and that he was “a learned godly man.” As we have seen, Simonds greatly admired Marshall’s preaching, and he immediately wrote to Gurnall in Latin and offered him the Lavenham benefice that was vacant because of Copinger’s death. Simonds noted that on August 9 Gurnall visited him in London. The conversation between the holder of the advowson and the beneficiary of his exercise of it must have been amiable, because on August 10 Simonds noted that Gur-

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nall had made it clear that he “did not wish to be instituted by a bishop.”150 Simonds then sought to find a way to install Gurnall. The preacher wrote to him from Sudbury on September 1 thanking him for various gifts and praising his patron for the way he worked “to give no less than others sell” to preachers: “Our Lord, who thus has as his favorite his Fiancée [the church] will not be forgetful of your love towards her.”151 On September 11, Simonds’s letter to Gurnall reported that he was consulting with Ralph Brownrigg at Cambridge (“a man of stupendous learning”) and his fellow MP John White about how to proceed.152 Gurnall wrote on September 5 to say that his “ship touched the Lavenhamian port” and that he would “approach this numerous people having been entrusted to me by you and with fatherly concern I would instruct and prepare” them.153 On November 12, Simonds wrote to Cornelius Burges (whom he addressed as “the other Speaker” of the Westminster Assembly) praising “this special William Gurnall” and representing that he had “freely conferred” with the people of Lavenham and determined that they supported Gurnall’s appointment there.154 On November 21, Gurnall dined with him in London, and Simonds “dictated on his behalf a Latin letter to Cornelius Burges, . . . asking for him to be admitted to the sacred ministry.” He wrote again on November 18 to tell Gurnall that he had seen John White and “plucked his ear.” He also was at work on “another way” by which “the matter will be solved.”155 It is not clear which of the strings he pulled turned out to be the decisive one, but on December 15 he set down in his diary that “I succeeded in having William Gurnall appointed pastor . . . in Lavenham” by means of parliamentary rather than episcopal authority. Coincidentally, this was just a day after he had heard Stephen Marshall preach “brilliantly in St. Margaret’s about the increase of grace in the righteous.”156 Irony abounds in the fact that in 1662, Gurnall would be ordained by Edward Reynolds, the new bishop of Norwich. A day later, Sir William Bowes, as Simonds’s brother-in-law and the executor of his will, presented Gurnall yet again to the rectory of Lavenham, a position he retained until his death in 1679. His grave is in the churchyard there. Had Gurnall mellowed ecclesiologically, or did the fact that he and his wife had fourteen children force him to be more pragmatic? Or both? What is certain is that Simonds had done his best to use whatever influence and authority he had to spread the availability of “godly preaching” in his sense of that potent phrase. In August 1647, Simonds received a letter from Elizabeth, who was visiting her parents in Derbyshire. “Sweet heart,” she wrote, “I haue been ernestly desired by one John Pimme that dwels at Dreconte [Draycott] to put you in mind of the busienes which hee was with you aboute concerning the settling of a competant means for a minister at that

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town, which worke I know is verrie pleasing to you.”157 This shows that she had come to a full understanding of her husband’s drive to use his advowsons at Stowlangtoft and Lavenham, his position as an MP, and his connections with learned divines at Cambridge to advance the establishment of “godly preaching.” Sir Harry, Simonds’s father-in-law, wrote to thank him for the way that he had “labored for and obtained the Prebends meanes for the mainetainence” of the minister at nearby Wilne and to entreat some assistance in the case of another adjacent village, Breston, where the poor vicar had served for fourteen years for the pittance of twelve pounds a year.158 This impetus had lain at the heart of English Puritanism from its inception in the 1560s, and Simonds strove never to miss an opportunity to pursue it throughout his adult life.

The Last Years The increasing clout of the “war party” at Westminster drove Simonds D’Ewes back toward the private sphere. As a historian of Christianity, he viewed the contest between orthodoxy and its Pelagian and neo-Pelagian enemies as a cyclical struggle that would sooner or later end in the victory of the truth when God determined that the time was right. In his own time, the Arminian/Pelagian altar-adorers seemed to be winning in the late 1620s and 1630s, but he had the good fortune to serve in the Long Parliament that overthrew them. By the mid-1640s, however, the chances for the kind of reformation he desired were growing dim, and his attention to his scholarly interests increased. Simonds was a collector and an antiquarian, but he lived in a time when what we think of as “archeology” scarcely existed. The collection and study of the material remnants of Greco-Roman or Carolingian or more recent medieval and early modern eras, including coins, were in important respects still in their infancy. Although his busy schedule as an MP cut into the time he had for these pursuits, they did not disappear. Rather, they gradually reasserted themselves alongside his declining hopes for a peaceful settlement of the Civil War during and after 1643. On the verso of a sheet of his historical notes probably written late in the first Civil War, he wrote that he sought “some refreshment” from the terrible public scene by returning to his studies and “seriously imployed all the spare houres which I conceiued I might Justly borrow from the Publike upon the new searches of old Records and in the midst of the Publike troubles did inlarge my store of manuscripts and Coynes.” If he succeeded in completing some of his projects, “the Publike” would not “be defrauded of soe many yeares Labours.”159

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the numismatist Simonds’s work as a collector of coins, books, and manuscripts and the scholarly uses he wished to make of them continued during his service as an MP. As we have seen, one of the things that made him successful in numerous debates in the House of Commons was his facility at finding precedents for this or that action in the historical records in the Tower of London that he had begun to explore in September 1623. Andrew Watson pointed out that one of Simonds’s “main interests in the last decade of his life was his coin collection.” There can be no doubt that he was hard at work on numismatical matters during the 1640s. In a Latin letter in 1648, Simonds offered “a fairly detailed account of his intentions to produce a new Theatrum Numarii Romani” that would have “four books, three to cover coins from the consular period to Heraclius and the fourth to be a numismatical glossary.” Watson opined that of the many scholarly projects Simonds began and never finished, this is the one that we should the most regret because “it would seem more suited to his limited talent and careful pedantry than one of a more interpretive nature.”160 At least as early as September 1639, Simonds had dangled not only his manuscripts but his “gold and silver and bronze coins” before Archbishop Ussher in an attempt to get the great divine to visit him at Stowlangtoft.161 Writing to Daniel Heinsius a year later, he made a similar pitch: “Would that we might enjoy your company for a few days, in which you might inspect in detail some thousands of autographs in my hands, together with the gold, silver, and bronze coins, some Greek, some Roman, some British, Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman.”162 By January 1645, he had brought his coin collection, or at least a significant part of it, to his lodgings in London. In his Latin diary, he mentioned that on January 9 after coming from the House late in the afternoon he “looked over” his coins. Five days later, before lunch, “I collated my coins.” Again, on January 21, “in the afternoon I classified my ancient coins.” The afternoon of January 25 was spent with Patrick Young, the royal librarian, examining the coins. On January 30, he “examined some coins,” presumably with a view to purchasing them.163 A sampling of the Latin diary suggests that, beginning in 1645, a week without several hours spent in numismatic pursuits was a rarity, and the trend line was upward. In January 1647 he spent some time with his coins on fifteen days. On March 4, 1647, Archbishop Ussher paid him a visit, during which they were “busy with coins.”164 Simonds continued his work on ancient coins to the end of his life. In October 1648 he received a warrant signed by King Charles himself from his captivity at Newport on the Isle of Wight. The king appointed “our

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trusty and welbeloued Sir Simonds D’Ewes in the County of Suffolck, Knight & Barronet” and his librarian Patrick Young to place the “diuers Medalls and ancient Coines, Greek, Roomane, and others” belonging to the royal library at St. James’s Palace “into their Series and order” while also removing duplicates and spurious items. Simonds was expressly granted the privilege of taking into “his owne custodie and keeping” items from the collection for his analysis.165 In 1649 and 1650, he corresponded in Latin with Johannes Smith (“Smetius,” 1590–1651) of Nijmegen in the Dutch province of Gelderland. Smetius, a clergyman and collector of Roman antiquities, wrote his Oppidum Batavorum (Amsterdam, 1644), a book in which he argued for Nijmegen’s place in the history of the Roman Empire with coins found in the region. Among the last letters Simonds received was one from Smith, who wrote it on January 1, 1650. Smith, against the conclusions of others whom Simonds had consulted, agreed with Simonds that some coins he had were counterfeits because “they seemed to differ too much in weight, form and inscription from the order of the genuine.” Smith went on to describe some Roman coins he had seen that combined “two Emperors on one coin.” One of them, for example, had a style of lettering characteristic of those from the reign of Antoninus Pius whereas the obverse he associated with that of Marcus Aurelius. He found that such “confusions of type are more frequent while the Empire gradually falls.”166 documents, descents, and dictionaries Whether or not one is convinced by Andrew Watson’s argument that Simonds failed to complete most of his projects because of his “limited talent,” there is no denying that he spread himself too thinly. While he consulted with Smith and others on numismatic questions, he also returned to the wide historical reading that had preoccupied him before 1640. He noted in his diary entry for January 2, 1644, that he and Young were “examining together . . . an abbreviation of the old history of [Henry of] Huntingdon,” and they continued to study it for a fortnight or more.167 Early in March, he mentioned that he was reading a biography of John Knox in David Buchanan’s Ecclesiastical History of Scotland, and in April and May he was reading Knox’s history of Scotland’s reformation.168 On June 4, he left the House at midday “to examine Domesday Book,” which had been hidden away due to “this deadly war” in order to get some details from “Section 24 (Worcestershire)” which “were of the highest utility to me.”169 In July, however, he complained that he had not managed to read much of Knox’s Scottish history “or of any other history . . . . For I scarcely had any opportunity of doing so.”170 Yet in the previous month,

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he had begun making extracts from the pipe rolls of Henry II and Henry III, a task he still had not completed at year’s end although he had finished his reading of Knox’s history by then.171 The press of work at Westminster remained high, and he complained on February 28, 1645, that “it has been a rare event this month for me to read Cornelius Tacitus. Moreover, I spent many hours (and this was a matter of compelling necessity)” putting in order the part of his library that he had brought from Stow Hall.172 We find more examples of his thirst for manuscripts in 1647. On January 4, he spoke in Parliament in the morning against a bill that would have given “vast power to the viceroys” in Ireland, but “the extremists . . . got their way at the vote.” He departed after two in the afternoon and spent the rest of the day making extracts from “the Anglo-Saxon laws of King Ethelred.”173 On January 20, he left the House before eleven and turned to “the register of St. Augustine of Canterbury,” a source he studied for more than a fortnight.174 But at the end of the month he taxed himself for having failed to have “done sufficient in the Latin language, except that I have often read in Fulvius Ursinus’s book on families.”175 He spent the afternoon of March 18 perusing “a manuscript book of assemblies” during the reigns of Edward I and Edward II.176 Simonds’s moments of frustration at the difficulty of finding time to read the historical works he enjoyed stemmed not only from his insistence on keeping up with business in Parliament, but also by his acquiescence to the numerous requests he received for “pedigrees” from various friends and family members. As we have seen, during the 1630s he had spent many hours taking notes on the records in London and in country houses and churches not only for the D’Ewes and Clopton families, but also for other families. The new kinships formed by his second marriage required research on the Wilughby and D’Arcy family trees and coats of arms. Word must have spread widely about the depth of his knowledge of the history of families in England beginning with Domesday Book and continuing into the seventeenth century. For example, on February 3, 1645, Conyers D’Arcy addressed Simonds as his “Noble Cosen” when he wrote from Hornby Castle in Yorkshire. Hard at work on his own genealogy, D’Arcy said that the “abilitye and paines” evident in the data Simonds had sent would provide the necessary correction “where I run awry.”177 On March 14, a man named “Steward,” one of John Brograve’s cousins, wrote with thanks for the letter Simonds had written to Brograve and passed on to him. He was grateful that it informed him about “the Antient descents of my Progenitours,” and he offered to show Simonds the “Antient deeds” of his family at King’s Lynn, Norfolk. He added that “in the interim there is a Pedegree of the family at my Chamber in Greyes Inn”

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that might interest the antiquarian and enclosed a warrant to go there and see it if it would be helpful.178 On April 2, 1647, Simonds wrote to Sir John Strangeways and conveyed the “descent” that Sir John had given him by “memory at my chamber in Westminster” in 1641. Simonds had “marked with the red lines” various particulars he could confirm “by other good authoritye.” On one point—the marriage of James Strangeways to “a sister of Thomas Lord Scrope of Upsall”—he had not found any evidence, but recalled that Sir John had told him he had proof in his papers. Strangeways replied on April 6 that he had not “had the happines to liue in my owne howse, which by the parliament forces is now burnt to the ground.” Thus the documents he had thought he could supply were gone unless a few that a “friend saved for me” were relevant. He hoped soon “to go into the Country & veiw them” and to let Simonds know what he found.179 That Simonds’s absorption in “descents” and “pedigrees” continued is demonstrated by a letter to him written on January 26, 1650, by John Stuteville, the son and heir of his dear friend Sir Martin. John had visited Simonds’s library at Stowlangtoft and was, as instructed, sending up to London not only Dyer’s reports (a legal text Simonds had first read as a law student) and “the Quadragesimes” of Edward III, but also three volumes of the Theatrum Genealogicum of Hieronymus Hennings. He was unable to find the other work Simonds called for—“Vnesuerus his descent of geneaology.”180 In his Latin diary Simonds frequently mentioned that he was working on numerous genealogical projects for his own family and others. The list of names is lengthy, and on many he labored over a period of weeks or longer: Basset, Moreton, Carew, Hoo, Welles, Maltravers, Chastelyn, Peyton, St. Omer, Saunder, Engaine, Waterton.181 Numerous notes and papers from his genealogical work survive in Harley MS 380, which has copies of wills or notes on wills and other probate documents, drawings (many in color) of seals, crests, and coats of arms, memorial inscriptions from funeral monuments in churches, details from Domesday Book and other medieval sources, and large fold-out sheets with diagrams of the family pedigrees (such as Clopton, Wilughby, D’Arcy, Barnardiston, Poley, Brograve, Bokenham, Carew, Knyvett, Basset, Peyton, Bourchier, Allington, and more). Volume 381 is similar. Its first forty-three folios concern the D’Ewes family in both Gelderland and England. To browse through these volumes is to be reminded of Simonds’s insistence on documentary proof for every detail that he placed in someone’s “descent.” Unlike many others, he resolutely refused to accept “tradition” alone as satisfactory proof. He also remained vigilant in his search for more evidence concerning his own Gelderlandish roots and befriended Louis Count of Egmont (a Catholic and the inheritor of the title of the duke of Gelder-

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land), a refugee from his homeland who fled to London in 1637. Simonds stated in the Commons that the count was indeed “a papist, but a presbyterial one, and one that hates the Jesuits.”182 Simonds’s papers include a draft of a letter from Egmont dated October 19, 1642, that granted to “Sir Simonds D’Ewes and his heirs, the territory of Kessel” when Gelderland was recovered from “the clutches of the Spaniard.” It has emendations in Simonds’s hand, along with his sketches of several coats of arms quartered with the D’Ewes quatrefoils at top left on the verso.183 The other long-standing project Simonds persisted with was his Anglo-Saxon lexicon. As we have seen, he thought it was near completion during his shrievalty in 1640, but he was wrong. On June 2, 1642, he apologized to de Laet, explaining that the “public businesses” had kept him from writing the letter he owed. The Dutchman had, in his letter of May 8, taxed Simonds with a mistake by using two Anglo-Saxon words (wael hreoh) as one word meaning “cruelty.” Simonds countered that his friend’s use of relhreolnegge was something he had never seen in any Anglo-Saxon text, although he had noticed that hreaolnegge meant cruelty “in the ancient Anglo-Saxon homilies and elsewhere.” He added that he had no desire whatsoever to quarrel about the dictionary, even though he had heard that de Laet had told some of his friends that he was “hurrying on that edition . . . with all effort.” This was after de Laet had assured him “both in letters and repeated conversation” that he had no intention of publishing such a work.184 If his letter had ended there and neither man wrote again, we could conclude that his anger at de Laet had led him to break off their connection. Yet Simonds then went on quite amiably to write an eleven-hundred-word narrative of events in England since his last letter, and their correspondence continued amply for another three years. Whatever differences they had about the lexicon were not serious enough to end, or even seriously damage, their friendship. On January 3, 1644, for example, his Latin diary states that he spent “the afternoon writing a Latin letter to a learned man in Holland, Jan de Laet.” On the next day, he recorded that he lunched with “the learned Abraham Wheelock” and spoke to him about editing his Anglo-Saxon dictionary.185 In his parliamentary journal for February 16, he wrote that he left the Commons late in the morning and spent the rest of the day “enlarging” the dictionary and improving his journal.186 On April 15, the diary says that he spent the afternoon augmenting his parliamentary journal, working on pedigrees, and adding to “my Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon dictionary.”187 Similar mentions of work on Anglo-Saxon appear at intervals in the diary thereafter. As we shall see, this project remained in prominent among his tasks in the months before his death in April 1650.

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It is important to remember that, despite his immersion in collecting books, manuscripts, and coins, constructing genealogies, and expanding his Anglo-Saxon lexicon, Simonds continued to attend the House of Commons daily, although not always for the entire day, and to speak out on matters about which he felt deeply. The heady early years of the Long Parliament when he often spoke several times a day were long gone, but he remained sufficiently vehement on occasion to earn his place on Colonel Pride’s list of goats who had to be separated from the sheep on December 6, 1648. Before then, he made time for his other activities by remaining in the House only until he could determine the business being undertaken that day. Frequently, if it was something he either had little interest in or disliked but knew that he could not impede, he left for all or part of the rest of the day. Because his parliamentary journal ended on November 1, 1645, and was for months before that quite thin, we cannot follow his contributions to the debates after that point. But his Latin diary and other sources show that he remained active as an MP until Pride’s Purge. For example, on May 15, 1645, he arrived between nine and ten, after which “some frivolous matters” were discussed. Therefore, “I went out shortly after I came in.” Historians of the Long Parliament read this and weep, worried that something Simonds considered “frivolous” was of great moment. He returned later that day, without indicating how much he had missed, and supplied an interesting description of the debate on the financing and direction of the navy. We are, yet again, on tenterhooks between gratitude for what he provided and regret for the silences.188 We should remember that he returned day after day only because there were certain overarching concerns to which he was passionately committed and that it is unjust to fault him for ignoring or downplaying other matters. A salaried court reporter he was not. Two of his persistent preoccupations were the Palatine family and the Dutch allies. When on March 4, 1643, an intercepted letter from Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, to her brother King Charles was read, the House learned that she told her brother how much she esteemed his queen, Henrietta Maria. Marten immediately spoke of the need Parliament had to beware of Elizabeth, “who had so well expressed her desires to further & hasten our ruin.” He then called for publication of the letter, and Simonds responded immediately to defend her. He reminded the MPs of “the great & long sufferings of this Princess, who hath been the scorne & obloquy of the Popish party through the Christian world for these many years.”189 On June 22, he spoke in support of Pym’s motion to send £3,000 to The Hague to relieve her financial plight. It passed 40–39.190 Just over a year later, he intervened again in favor of sending more money to her.191 Beginning in

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April 1644, he became the man to whom the House of Commons turned for the maintenance of its communication with the Prince Elector, Charles Lewis. Both the diary and the journal contain numerous references to the Latin letters that they exchanged, reports Simonds made to the House about the prince, and speeches he made in the young man’s defense. For example, at the end of August the prince turned up in England unexpectedly, thereby angering many in Parliament. Simonds confessed himself “surprised that the prince had not consulted me, after I had concerned myself with his affairs so assiduously for the past six months and more.” He nevertheless attended Charles Lewis during his visit and was gratified when, on September 14, the prince “thanked me profusely for the letters I had sent him and urged me to continue in my role as a letter-writer.”192 Nor did Simonds forget other Calvinist friends on the Continent. When questions arose about relations with the Dutch late in July 1644, many MPs complained that the Dutch “had done us injury and supported the king with arms.” Simonds answered that he hoped all remembered the Dutch resistance to the Spanish Armada in 1588 and “Van Tromp’s defeating of the Spanish fleet before this parliament . . . by all which we [were] saved and sit here in safety.” He conceded that there were a few Dutchmen who valued neither “God nor religion but their own private gain,” but everybody knew many Englishmen who operated on the same execrable principle. “Generally,” he insisted, the Dutch “wish well to us, our safety with theirs, their safety mixed with ours.” In wartime, with the control of English ports shifting between king and parliament, it was inevitable that disputes over ships and cargos would arise, but these could be settled if the Parliament established a committee to adjudicate such disputes. His motion to that effect soon passed, and he became a member of it.193 Early in January 1645, Willem Boreel and John Reede, two “extraordinary envoys” of the United Provinces, arrived, and they dined with Simonds on January 8.194 Their choice of him as one of their first contacts is likely to have been directed by his dear friend, Albert Joachimi, the resident Dutch diplomat. Simonds, ever punctilious about protocol, noted that when the three ambassadors had their first audience in the House of Commons on April 10 they sat on “three velvet chairs on a carpet . . . on the north side of the house.” Boreel made his remarks in French, and after the ambassadors left, some of the violenti complained that no English translation of his statement had been provided.195 This contretemps left Simonds much repair work to do, and so, for example, on May 7, he objected to a declaration from the Committee of Both Kingdoms that criticized the behavior of the Dutch ambassadors. He said that “there were many contradictions and falsities in it.”196

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Simonds’s defense of his foreign friends was mirrored in the work he kept doing to support his friends at home against the demands of a rapacious Parliament and especially its sequestration process for seizing the property of anyone who could be labeled a “delinquent” and forcing the victim to “compound” for its return. There is, to be sure, an irony here, because he continued to celebrate the victories of Parliament’s armies at Marston Moor, Naseby, and elsewhere. His enemies objected that he approved the goal but opposed the necessary means to pay for its achievement. His position, established quite early, was that the Parliament should find the money to fight the good fight without resorting to such devices. The Committee for Sequestration, like most committees of the House of Commons, normally met in the afternoon, and many entries in his Latin diary mention his attendance there in order to speak for friends whose cases were being adjudicated. For example, on April 19, 1644, he was there and spoke to Sir John Tyrrell “about the injustice done to him and others.” He returned on May 1 in Tyrrell’s matter and was “partially successful.”197 Thomas Stuteville’s first appearance before the committee was on July 29, and Simonds was at his side. On September 24, he left the house a little before noon, and “in the afternoon my principal task was to help Thomas Stuteville, and by the goodness of God he was set free.”198 On April 2, 1645, he was there and again on May 14 trying to aid Sir Roger Twysden.199 He was still undertaking such tasks in 1647. On January 13, he assisted his sister-in-law, Lady Aston, before the committee.200 pride’s purge One aspect of his public career ended on November 3, 1645, the day of the final entry in his parliamentary journal. From the previous July 1 onward, most of the journal entries are rough, brief, and sketchy. Following folio 263, there are twenty-three pages that are written on sheets from The Primitive Practise for Preserving Truth, and Simonds’s assistant wrote the entries on the outer margins of the printed pages. Presumably, the printer had provided the author with the loose sheets of one or both of editions, so these were left over from the proofreading that Simonds had done in August. Many of these entries look like the rough jottings made either in the House or at the end of a day there that he later expanded from memory on the numerous days that his diary says he spent time “perfecting” his journal. Why, we wonder, did he choose to end his journal at this particular moment? Two of the fullest entries after July 1 are the last two: Saturday, November 1 and Monday, November 3. He was not present on the Saturday morning. That day’s session resumed between 2 and 3 p.m., and he walked in around 4 p.m. and found himself listening to “the reading

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of some intercepted letters of the Lord Digby’s which were newly come to town.” These revealed that Charles I had been part of elaborate negotiations that involved an alliance with the Dutch stadholder, Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange, whose daughter would marry the young Prince of Wales. In addition, “the Duke of Lorraine’s army [was] to assist the king against the parliament,” and “many other secrets were also discovered of the king’s plotting with other foreign states.” The reading ended when messengers from the House of Lords arrived, and it was decided to return to them on Monday morning at eight.201 Simonds arrived at nine on Monday only to find that his colleagues were discussing a bill to tax the Welsh, so he left again. He came back in the afternoon and heard more “great secrets” that involved Henrietta Maria (who was negotiating with Pope Innocent X and also working to bring various French and Italian princes into the struggle in England). More disturbing was evidence of the king’s efforts to import an army of Irish rebels by offering them religious toleration and access to public office.202 Perhaps Simonds ended his journal because there was no longer any reason to hope that the king had any intention of reaching an accommodation with the Long Parliament. Yet even if he still had hopes for the king (even if only God could change Charles’s mind), he could have stopped writing because he realized that the violenti now had all the ammunition they needed to insist that the king must be utterly defeated. Whatever the answer to those questions, his Latin diary and some letters prove that he persevered as an MP until his public career came to an end on December 6, 1648. As we have seen, by 1645 or 1646, Simonds was disturbed by the rise of a faction of political Independents in the Parliament and their allies in the new army that was created by the violenti and led by Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell. On January 14, 1647, Simonds objected vigorously to news that some of Fairfax’s soldiers had forcibly intervened in a bye-election at Cirencester to block the choice of the electors, allegedly at the behest of Fairfax himself, who was a candidate. Simonds, always insistent upon the parliamentary privilege of free elections, then began to attend the meetings of the Committee on Elections where, on February 15, there was talk of a “fake” election at Cirencester. On March 11, he spoke against Fairfax’s move to encamp his army in Essex and Hertfordshire, but “the Independents were so much in ascendancy that nothing was done to remedy the situation.”203 On February 16, he had denounced Oliver St. John’s motion for the execution of some of the men who had “shown violent opposition to the payment of the excise, . . . saying we should not stain our vast money-collections with the blood of the people.”204

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Even without his attacks on the Independents at this late stage, Simonds would surely have been seen as one of the peace-party MPs opposed to the army’s agenda. Early on the frosty morning of December 6, about a thousand soldiers patrolled the streets around Whitehall and blocked access to the Parliament’s chamber. The colonel of one of the regiments, Thomas Pride, stood at the top of the stairs with a list in his hand. As the MPs arrived, he arrested forty-five of them and turned two hundred or more away. Only those who had not made themselves obnoxious to the army were allowed to enter. According to David Underdown, “the principal targets,” one of whom was Simonds, were held in the Queen’s Court during the day and that evening imprisoned in “a common victualling-house” that was “‘dark and low,’ and appropriately named Hell.” The prisoners “were frequently reminded of their guards’ bitter feelings, the officers having passed the word that these were the culprits responsible for withholding their pay.”205 Over the weeks ahead, many were released, including Simonds on December 14. His sister, Grace Bokenham, wrote from the country, saying, “Prudente brother, I cannot but truly simpathize in these your sad and many sufferings. I hope our pious and faithfull heart will bee of much comfort to your good selfe in all these deepe and heauie presures.” He made a note on it: “written by my sister Bokenham & dated Dec 14 (1648) being the same day I was sett at libertie, after I had been vnlawfullie restrained by some of the armie vnder Fairfax . . . from Dec 6 for about a weekes space.”206 His friend and fellow MP Sir Edward Leigh was still being held when he wrote to Simonds on January 17 and said that he “did not thinke when I came to bee a prisoner that I should haue been 5 weekes together without any more then once seeing my Ladie at our place of confinement.” Leigh, a Staffordshire gentleman and for a time the commander of a regiment in the parliamentary army, signed himself “Your Affectionate Kinsman to serve you.”207 Thus did both Simonds and, later, Leigh find themselves rudely pushed back into their private lives by the Colonel Pride and the New Model Army. private life—and death Fortunately for Simonds, life at home in the late 1640s had many pleasures, despite occasional sorrows. His Latin diary repeatedly records that his day ended with the happy phrase, sociando cum uxore (“I chatted with my wife”).208 His communications with his sisters and their husbands continued to be loving. For example, on March 20, 1645, Grace Bokenham wrote to thank him for “his last favour . . . which deserues to bee recorded to eternitie.” She very much hoped that “by gods assisstance, wee may once more meete againe” in this life so that he could see “how like i am to

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our olde grandmother rauenscroft” due to her many childbirths and illnesses “which your selfe hath formerly smild at. . . . Oh how happy are all my other sisters in being so nere your much desired selfe.” Although they were “bodylie” separated, her “purest prayers shall neuer bee separated from your faithfull selfe.”209 Among those living nearby were his eldest sister, Jone, and her husband, Sir William Ellyott, who were frequently in London from Surrey. Her death on April 14, 1646, in London hit both men hard. On July 20, Sir William wrote to Simonds, his “worthy good Brother,” whose relation “to that inualuable Creature now with god” he would never forget. The passage of time did not help him, because “with the dayes my sorrowes ar renewed, and my greatest vnhappiness is that I haue been so happye.” Thus only God, “who is fullnes it selfe, can recompence . . . me.” He asked Simonds’s advice about decisions he had to make about the disposition of his estate in his will, and he expressed his desire to know “how god hath blessed you and your right vertuous Ladye in a desired offspring, as also the recouerye of her strength.” He thus knew that Elizabeth had recently given birth to a daughter, Mary. Included with Ellyott’s letter was a sheet dated August 1646 on which he listed the names of the twelve sons and four daughters Jone had borne him, of whom seven outlived their mother.210 The spiritual regimen of the D’Ewes’s changed little in the 1640s. He and Elizabeth spent their Sunday mornings (and often afternoons as well) listening to sermons. They frequented what he called the “new chapel” of St. Stephen in Westminster Abbey, and they also attended many of the parliamentary fast sermons at St. Margaret’s. They heard Stephen Marshall often but also many other leading preachers, many of them members of the Westminster Assembly, and they often heard Archbishop Ussher at Covent Garden. The family spent the rest of the Lord’s day in what he called his “pious duties with my household.”211 These probably included a repetition of the main points of the sermons they had heard, prayers, reading of Scripture, and self-examination. Simonds sometimes mentioned, as he did on March 14, 1647, that “my great weaknesses were much in my thoughts.”212 In Parliament at this time, there was great interest in suppressing public preaching unless it was by ordained ministers. Simonds supported this effort, but with the important caveat that “the excuse of eliminating heresies” not hinder Christians from engaging in “private devotion.” The heads of families, in other words, should not be hindered in their leadership of the religiosity of their households on the Sabbath.213 Throughout both of his marriages, Simonds and his wives dearly hoped for sons. But this did not mean that they did not treasure their daughters. Anne D’Ewes’s last child, Elizabeth, was born during the Christmas sea-

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son in 1641, so she was about six months old when her mother died. Her two older sisters were sent to Albury Lodge and cared for by Hanna and John Brograve. Little Elizabeth stayed at Boxted Hall with the Poleys, who wrote on March 2, 1644, with the sad news the child was suffering from convulsions.214 Her wetnurse, Mary Page, had cared for several of Anne’s children, and on March 13 she wrote at length to Simonds describing the little girl’s symptoms. She said that Elizabeth’s convulsions began soon after her mother’s death and were similar to little Clopton’s but that they had abated somewhat as she grew. Because they seemed to be brought on by crying, Mary took “a speasiall care not to let her crye.” Elizabeth was “A mannerly sweate [sweet] childe” who “with on[e] word doe that I would haue her doe.”215 Soon after this, the little girl joined her older sisters in Hertfordshire, but when she became ill, Simonds and Elizabeth traveled to the Brograve home. On June 16, they heard the minister, Francis Commyn, who “preached well morning and afternoon on Christ as mediator and on faith.” Sadly, however, “my little daughter was worse and spent a very disturbed night.” The next day, after the child seemed to improve, they returned to London. On the morning of June 20, however, John Brograve informed him that on the day before at about two in the afternoon, Simonds’s “beautiful and charming youngest daughter Elizabeth was seized by a burning fever and died.” Simonds wrote that “this sad augury made me afraid that in the end God would take all my daughters from me and not grant me any issue of my second wife. My dread was that this and other things had occurred on account of my sins, which tortured me greatly.” As he continued about his business during the day, he “almost everywhere emitted deep-drawn sobs out of the grief inside me.” Sleepless nights followed, and when he went to hear a fast sermon on June 23, “my soul was still almost overwhelmed with grief for my daughter’s death.”216 Simonds came to see his daughters on January 15, 1645, and on the following day he took them back to London to live with Elizabeth and himself. Sissilia and Isolda were greeted “with great joy and sincere gladness of heart by their sweet, pious stepmother as if they were her own daughters.” On January 17, he wrote the first of several Latin letters to the learned lady Anna Maria van Schurman in Utrecht seeking, among other things, advice about the education of his daughters and his young wife.217 Van Schurman did not reply until October, and in his response he said that he was encouraging his daughters “by proposing you as a model, so that they might press forward in the more noble studies.”218 It seems that, at least in the case of Sissilia, Simonds had some success. Sir Edward Leigh, who became a prolific writer in the years after Pride’s Purge,

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dedicated his treatise, The Saints Encouragement in Evil Times (1651), to Simonds’s daughters. In his preface, he described Isolda as “spritefull and ingenious,” whereas Sissilia he considered “naturally of a milde temper.” Leigh noted that Sissilia was at one time as “wel-grounded in Latine,” as Anna Maria van Schurman, “that Mirrour of Learning for the Female sex” had indicated in a letter to her father. Leigh urged her not to lose “the knowledge you once had” because it would “inable you to write true English, and to prize learning in others. Go on to practise your Italian hand in the well taking of Sermons, and handsome composure of Epistles.”219 Sissilia turned sixteen in November 1651, and her sister was five years younger. In the letter to van Schurman cited above, Simonds also mentioned that he was hoping that his then eighteen-year-old wife would also “imbibe the rudiments of literature,” but that she could not do so at the time (January 1645) because she was nearing the end of a pregnancy. One of the Barnardistons wrote on August 19, 1646, offering thanks to God “in your sweete Ladys behalfe in her safe delivery of her daughter whom the Lord hath given you as a pledge of further posterity by her.”220 This must have been Mary, who died on September 8, 1647, according to a Latin letter Simonds wrote to George Speed early in 1649. On that sad day, he said, “the highest God had fetched [her] to himself.”221 The very long awaited son finally entered the world approximately a month before his father’s death. In the same January 26, 1650, letter from John Stuteville cited above listing the books requested by Simonds from his library at Stowlangtoft, Stuteville mentioned that his sister Susan had baked “groning Cakes” for Elizabeth. He was sending these along with the books, and he closed with the wish of “all of us . . . [for] a happy howre for hir safe deliuery.”222 One of Elizabeth’s cousins, Abigail D’Arcy, was in London when she wrote to Simonds on March 6, 1650, to ask “how your good Lady doth after her sore bargan.” She also asked whether he intended to keep to his “resolution of baptising your sonne tomorrowe.” If so, she planned to attend the happy ceremony.223 There is nothing else in the D’Ewes papers other than these two letters that enable us to know when the infant who was christened Willoughby D’Ewes entered the world. Simonds quickly wrote a codicil that he added to the Latin will he had completed earlier. It bequeathed his estate (including his library) to Willoughby and the house he had leased at Westminster to his widow (for whom he wrote he would have done more “if I had not been plundered for so long by the public depredations of civil war”). The will already stated that “my sweetest and most chaste wife, whose inner piety grows warmer and whose unique love for me is increased every day,” would receive an annual payment of £146 as an in-

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crease in her dowry for the rest of her life).224 When Willoughby was just over a month old, William Somner wrote a short letter from his home in Canterbury to Simonds “at his house in Stable yard Westminster.” The letter was dated April 9, and Somner, an antiquarian steeped in Anglo-Saxon language and literature and a Royalist, was helping with some of Simonds’s projects. On January 2, the antiquary William Dugdale had written to thank Simonds for the assistance that he had given him in December, and he expressed pleasure that his friend had the help of “that honest man Mr Sumner,” who would expedite the printing of “your Saxon Lexicon & the laws.” Those would doubtless go “much better though the times be bad then Beda, which you know was printed in the heart of the war.”225 Somner said that he had expected to have left the day before on his journey to join Simonds at his London lodgings when he had received Simonds’s “vnexpected countermand.” Somner expressed regret not for his own “disappointment” but for “the sad & suddaine cause thereof, whose remedy & remove shall not want what forbearance my heartiest prayers can contribute.” Simonds must have experienced a sudden and severe illness, and he died on April 18.226 The cause of death is unknown, but in the absence of any hint of declining health, a heart attack or stroke seems the leading candidate. He was forty-eight years old, and his body was buried in the chancel of the church at Stowlangtoft on June 7, 1650.227 At least he seems to have been spared the prolonged and painful deaths his parents had undergone with him as witness, chronicler, and mourner. Most important, he died knowing that Elizabeth had given him a son who would be his heir if the child lived. In any case, it seems certain that he had not forgotten what he had written in his will. He there thanked God for granting him a lively faith, a certain hope of eternal life, and an inward hatred of all sin whatsoever, . . . and [I] do firmly believe that I was elected from all eternity, that I am redeemed, cleansed, and justified by the precious blood of our Saviour; . . . And I do further supplicate and implore His infinite compassion, that when my last hour shall approach, . . . my soul may be carried by his angels into Abraham’s bosom, there to enjoy eternal happiness with the residue of his saints and elect children.228

The suddenly fatherless Willoughby probably remained with his widowed mother, who next married Sir John Wray of Glentworth in Lincolnshire, the son and namesake of one of Simonds’s fellow MPs in the Long Parliament. Elizabeth died in November 1655 at the age of twenty-seven and was buried at Glentworth. It is uncertain where Willoughby—then an orphan at age six—was sent.229 His two older sisters went into the care of the widowed sisters, Elizabeth Denton and Susan Stuteville, at Ixworth.230

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Isolda died unmarried, and Sissilia married Sir Thomas Darcy of St. Osyth in Essex and gave birth to a daughter who died young. Sissillia herself died in 1661.231 At his death in 1685, Willoughby bequeathed his father’s estate to his son, Sir Simonds D’Ewes, the third baronet. This is the man who sold his grandfather’s library in 1705 to Robert Harley, earl of Oxford, and the grandson of one of Simonds’s fellow MPs, Sir Robert Harley. The third baronet’s son, the fourth and last baronet, Sir Jermyn D’Ewes, died unmarried in 1731.232 We owe the intact arrival of the library at the British Museum to the debts that faced the third baronet, an accident that this writer and readers who have persevered this far in the present volume will regard as a blessing in disguise. Simonds himself would probably have described it as a divine providence, although he would have regretted that his family line would undergo yet another eclipse from which it would not recover.

Epilogue What, it must be asked, would Simonds D’Ewes have thought about what modern historians have said about his life, work, and career? Would he have been pleased that Conrad Russell, quoting him in his Ford lectures, proposed that “the diagnostic sign of a Parliamentarian” is expressed in Simonds’s claim “that Queen Elizabeth ‘rather setled a beginning of a Reformation than a Reformation’”?233 He believed that Elizabeth had initiated a process of reform that was not completed during her reign. More, he fervently insisted, was needed. Although he hated “parties” and was always—in his own mind—an advocate for king and Parliament, Russell’s judgment is acute. Simonds wrote to his brother on June 21, 1642, that he would stay at Westminster, “wheere I shall persist as I haue done hitherto procul amore procul liuore procul partium studio [far from passion, far from spite, far from siding with parties] to discharge my dutie” to God, the king, and the kingdom “without feare or favour.”234 Yet Simonds’s definition of “true religion” made him a Parliamentarian in practice despite his discomfort about “parties.” especially after the resurgence of neo-Pelagianism and altar-adoring “idolatry” under Elizabeth’s successors. He put the point neatly in the preface to his Primitive Practise when he referred to “the many distractions amongst us at this present, when a blessed Reformation is so neere the birth, and yet the Church seems to want strength to bring it forth.”235 How would he have responded to Blair Worden’s characterization of the ecclesiological goals of many members of the Long Parliament as neither wholly Congregationalist nor wholly Presbyterian? Worden asserted that MPs wanted instead to “preserve the national unity of the Church . . . [and to] protect the parishes, and the in-

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fluence commanded by the leaders of local society there, from central interference.”236 Simonds was very much of this mind. Although he had reluctantly burned his bridge to episcopacy early in 1641, his next step was uncertain because he distrusted both of the alternatives to it that emerged. Two perceptive statements about Simonds’s thinking came from William Lamont and Willson Coates. Of the Presbyterian program, Lamont wrote that “a man of D’Ewes’s temperament was simultaneously repelled by clerical claims to jurisdiction and attracted by the moral code that was promised.” He quoted D’Ewes’s praise of the way that in New England “vices and sins are so severely punished amongst them, and the godly so countenanced and advanced as in that respect it seems to be a true type of heaven itself.” “Nowhere,” Lamont observed, “is the ethical craving of Erastians more cogently expressed.”237 To this, it should be added that Simonds’s unceasing efforts to increase the amount and quality of godly preaching in places where he had any influence demonstrated his zeal to exemplify the ideal Puritan patron and thereby encourage others to follow his example. The result would be to multiply the number of pulpits filled by preachers like William Gurnall and thereby achieve the single most important objective of the Puritan movement. Coates thoughtfully discerned that “both deliberately and inadvertently D’Ewes was one of the most self-revealing of men.” Although his piety “verged on moral priggishness,” and he had “an inordinate desire to establish a distinguished family . . . he also had the genuine Puritan’s capacity for self-analysis and for fighting, if not always with success, against his own weaknesses. . . . Nothing in his journal is more genuine than what it reveals of D’Ewes’s sense of propriety and his sense of justice.”238 Simonds D’Ewes’s Puritanism, ego, ambition, family pride, legalism, and pedantry have drawn attention away from an important point that has too often been missed. He was, in social and political terms, deeply conservative and thereby someone who appeared to be a natural defector from Parliament to King Charles in 1642. But he was also utterly devoted to the institution of Parliament and to the Church of England (or at least his own vision of it). Unlike many conservatives, he was a vigorous advocate of more inclusive franchises in parliamentary elections, and it is possible that his stand on the Englishman’s “birthright” facilitated his connection with the radical printer, Richard Overton, who printed his Primitive Practise in 1645. Not even blandishments from his beloved brother Richard could draw him away from London, because he rightly sensed that, however deferential to King Charles he remained or how hard he worked to achieve a negotiated peace, the chance of bringing about the kind of religious reformation he craved would disappear if the Royalists

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won and the Arminians returned to power in the religious sphere. He did not understand that the bar he had set was too high for a man like Charles I to leap over. Simonds typified a large group of men within the Long Parliament and outside it without whom there would have been no civil war.239 He represents a part of what would have been the king’s political and religious “base” if only Charles I had had the wit and the political skill to comprehend and exploit by making genuine concessions in a timely way. That Simonds persisted in the pursuit of his own agenda right up to Pride’s Purge and that the leaders of the New Model Army put him on the list of enemies to be imprisoned on December 6, 1648, demonstrates that he was perceived as a threat to the army’s plans. Despite his eccentricities, he was not an outlier; rather he shared with many others a fundamental antipathy to the Laudian program that gave the Parliamentarian movement a coherence and a broadly based body of support. Like others, he defended Parliament and its privileges partly because they might protect his wealth from ruinous taxation, but he persisted because no other institution existed that could defend “true religion” against neo-Pelagian heresy, “idolatry,” and “popery.” Simonds remained a vigorous letter writer during his final years, but he appears to have kept few drafts of the letters he wrote during this period. Even if we had all of them, given his habitual caution, we ought not to be surprised if none discussed the regicide explicitly. He would have been appalled by the trial and execution of the king. On January 20, 1649—the day that the trial of Charles I began—Sir William Dugdale wrote to Simonds describing “this dealing” toward the king as “noe doubt the great wonder of all Christendome, soe must it needes be the shame of the English nation to this and future ages.”240 Simonds would probably have agreed with this and with the sentiments John Stuteville expressed in a letter he received about a year before he died. Stuteville thanked him for his “kind lines, together with the enclosed papers,” which revealed the “great distemper” of the nation. In the last year of his life, Simonds was still supplying news about the political situation to his friends. Stuteville opined that “our particular, and Nationall sinnes” had reached such a peak that “the greatest of temporall Judgements, Warre, Pestilence, & Famine, even all the Plagues of Egipt wee may expect & looke for.” Even worse, he feared that the next disaster would be “a Spirituall Judgement, the remoovall of our Candlesticke, the Glorious Gospell (wch hath shined soe cleerely amongst us for many ages together) to some other Nation which will bring forth better fruite then wee haue done.” A better expression of the concern that had pervaded John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments is not easy to find. Stuteville asked, “haue wee not suffred in euery Part?

“No end . . . but by the sword”

I can not say the Head is sicke: but (alas) quite cut off, and in the roome therof, a Prodigious Hydra sprung up. I am sure our Heart languisheth: our free Parliaments (wch haue formerly beene the very Heart, & vitals of the Kingdome) are now driuen away, & confined to a very few, within the Walls of the House of Commons, & those ouer awed by the Sword.”241 We can imagine that Simonds, reading Stuteville’s letter, nodded his head after each sentence. Indeed, he had himself written as early as December 1642 that he feared that there would be “no end of these present troubles but by the sword.” Parliament man that he was, he would not have welcomed the military rule of the 1650s, and enemy of lasciviousness that he was, the Restoration would have been no improvement had he lived into that era. He would have agreed with Stuteville that “a Prodigious Hydra” had indeed appeared. However unhappy Simonds would have been, we are fortunate that his papers allow us to enter deeply into his public and private worlds. Thanks to his fervent piety, his theological and liturgical commitments, his note-taking, news gathering, corresponding, and collecting habits, we have an intimate view into the life of a seventeenth-century gentleman—a Puritan, a Parliamentarian, a lawyer, genealogist, and antiquarian. He enables us to understand more fully the reasons why Britain plunged into civil wars in the 1640s and why the wars had the consequences that they did. The zeal, energy, perseverance, and passion with which D’Ewes and other like-minded men set out in 1640 to “stub vp the rootes of all our mischifes” were among the major causes of the English Revolution.

435

Thomas Isham

John (d. 1563)

Andrew (d. 1563) James Peter

Paul (d. 1563) Alice = William Lathum (d. 1614)

Elizabeth = Gheerardt (d. 1591) = Grace Hinde (d. 1583)

Paul (1604–7)

Simonds (1602–50)

Grace (b. 1604) = Wiseman Bokenham

Marie (b. 1608) = Sir Thomas Bowes

Sissilia (1613–21)

Richard (1617–43)

Elizabeth = Sir William Poley

This chart is based on Watson, 346 and 348, with minor corrections and some additional details. For charts showing the descent of Anne Clopton and of Simonds d’Ewes’s descendants, see Watson, 347–48.

Ione (1601–46) = Sir William Ellyott

Sir John Isham Sir Martin Stuteville = Susan Stuteville Sir Anthony Denton = Elizabeth Isham = Paul (d. 1631) = Sissilia Simonds (d. 1618)

John (d. 1543)

Adrian (d. 1551) = Alice Ravenscroft (d. 1579)

Mary van Loe of Antwerp = Adrian

Gheerardt = Ann Van Hulst of Juliers

Gheerardt Des Ewes, Lord of Kessel = Anne, dau. of the Earl of Horne

Appendix A: The D’Ewes Genealogy

Appendix B: The Children of Sir Edmonds D’Ewes

By Anne Clopton: 1.  Anne (born in Islington, April 30, 1630; died at Stepney, July 26, 1641). 2.  Clopton I (born in Lavenham on June 2, 1631, baptized July 5, died July 9). Buried in Lavenham under the “baby brass” in the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul. 3.  Adrian (born in Bury St Edmunds on March 10, 1633 and died the same day). 4.  Geerardt (twin to Adrian, died on March 13). The twins were buried with Clopton I in Lavenham. 5.  Clopton II (born July 18, 1634 at Ixworth; died May 8, 1636, at Stow Hall and buried in St. George Stowlangtoft). 6.  Elizabeth (probably born in the Christmas season of 1640-41 and died on June 19, 1645, at Albury Lodge in Hertfordshire.. 7.  Sissilia (born November 25, 1635 at Stow Hall). She married Sir Thomas Darcy, died in 1661, and on June 1 of that year was buried in the “Clopton aisle” of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Long Melford. 8.  Geva (born in June or July 1638; died June 7, 1640). 9.  Adrian II (born August 29, 1639; died June 1, 1640). 10.  Isolda (probably born in December 1640 and died after 1651).

By Elizabeth Wilughby: 1. Mary (born in the summer of 1646 and died on September 8, 1647). 2. Willoughby (probably born in London and baptized there on March 7, 1650). At his death in 1685, the D’Ewes estate went to his son, Sir Simonds D’Ewes (third baronet).

Notes

Introduction: “An industrious mind” 1. Sharpe, 691. 2.  This estimate comes from T. C. Skeat, the Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum from 1961 to 1972, in his foreword to Andrew G. Watson’s volume, The Library of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (London: The Trustees of the British Museum, 1966), v. Skeat characterized D’Ewes’s “printed books” as “in no way remarkable,” but “his collection of manuscripts and charters was outstanding, and provided a rich source of historical materials on which the leading antiquaries of his day were glad to draw.” Skeat was quite right that D’Ewes’s printed books were not unusual unless we take an interest in what they tell us about what he read, thought, and valued. Watson’s thorough and careful description of D’Ewes’s library is superb and invaluable. Watson, 1. 3.  Besides manuscripts and books, the collection included ancient coins and even prints. According to Malcolm Jones, D’Ewes assembled the earliest collection of prints in England that we know of, which was described as occupying “‘Three large bookes.’ A dozen or so of the many prints that once filled these volumes have descended to the British Museum’s collection.” The Print in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 27. 4.  Halliwell’s service to scholarship in transcribing D’Ewes’s autobiography and publishing it is admirable, but his transcription contains numerous errors, is heavily bowdlerized, modifies spelling and punctuation, and offers almost nothing in the way of explanatory apparatus. For a long time, the only available published editions of the early parts of the D’Ewes journal were by Wallace Notestein for November 3, 1640, to March 20, 1640 (Yale University Press, 1923), and Willson Coates for October 12, 1641, to January 10, 1642 (Yale University Press, 1942). A new edition of the Proceedings in the Opening Session of the Long Parliament (House of Commons) from November 3 until September 9, 1641, has been edited by Maija Jansson and published by the Yale Center for Parliamentary History in seven volumes (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2000–7). It contains D’Ewes’s journals alongside the work of the clerks of the House of Commons and the other members whose journals have survived. Three additional volumes of The Private Journals of the Long Parliament, edited by Willson Coates, Anne Steele Young, and Vernon F. Snow, cover the period from January to September 1642 (Yale University Press, 1982, 1987, 1992). 5. Sharpe, 693.

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Notes to the Introduction 6. Bruce, Review, 79. For the childhood injury to his eye, see p. 18 below. 7. Ibid., 84. 8. Ibid., 86. 9.  POSLP 3: 6n, 4, 6. 10. Bruce, Review, 90. 11. Bruce, Journal, 331. 12. Bruce, Review, 82. 13.  The Columbia Companion to British History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 234. 14.  The Reign of King Pym (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941), 24. 15. Russell, FBM, 537. 16.  For a small sample from the correspondence, see Halliwell, 2:159–318. 17. Watson, 54–55, 61. 18. Ibid., 62–63. 19.  The unhappy fate of the papers of Sir Edward Dering, D’Ewes’s friend and a fellow antiquarian and MP, provides a good example of the way such scattering and outright losses could occur. See the list of archives now holding Dering’s papers in the ODNB, s.v. “Dering, Edward.” 20.  Emphasis added. 21.  English Travellers Abroad, 1604–1667 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952), 408n. 22.  BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 28. 23.  Ibid., MS 379, fo. 58. 24.  Noah Millstone, “Evil Counsel: The Propositions to Bridle the Impertinency of Parliament and the Critique of Caroline Government in the Late 1620s,” JBS 50 (October 2011): 835. 25.  The Godly Man in Stuart England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). 26.  I am therefore pleased about the shift in emphasis in recent scholarship concerning religious history that Arnold Hunt characterizes as “from the clerical producer to the lay consumer.” Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 4. 27.  See, for example, William S. Lamont, Marginal Prynne: 1600–1669 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963); John Morrill, “Sir William Brereton and England’s Wars of Religion,” JBS 24 (1985): 311–32; Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Richard Cust and Peter Lake, “Sir Richard Grosvenor and the Rhetoric of Magistracy,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 54 (1981). 28.  The Nature of the English Revolution (London: Longman, 1993), 15. 29. Autobiography, fo. 28v (1:95). 30.  Primitive Practise, 1. 31.  BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 55r. 32.  Autobiography, fo. 159r (2:101). 33.  Ibid., fo. 171v (2:141–42). 34.  Ibid., fo. 162v (2:113–14). 35.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 204r. 36.  BL Stowe MS 743, fo. 95r.

Chapter 1: “A rationall hearer”—1602–1620 1.  Autobiography, fo. 1r (1:1). Chardstock (transferred to Devon in 1896) is four and a half miles south of Chard near the border of Devon and Somerset. In D’Ewes’s time, it lay in the Dorset hundred of Whitchurch (or Whitway). 2.  Ibid., fo. 1r (1:2).

Notes to Chapter 1 3.  Ibid., fo. 1v (1:4). 4.  Ibid., fo. 39v (1:113–14). Halliwell had a colorful, energetic, and in some ways checkered career as a collector of manuscripts and participant in the founding of societies to publish them, such as the Historical Society of Science. See Sarah Dry, The Newton Papers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), ch. 7. My thanks to her for sending me her chapter on Halliwell in advance of publication. 5.  Autobiography, fo. 1v (1:4–5). 6.  Ibid., fo. 8v (1:25). 7.  Ibid., fo. 9v (1:26–27). 8.  Ibid., fos. 9v–10r (1:27–29). The early death of his brother Paul, who was born on January 3, 1605, must have heightened the family’s concern for Simonds’s health. 9.  Ibid., fo. 10v (1:29). 10.  Ibid., fos. 10v–11r (1:29–31). Welshall was in the parish of Milding (or Milden), four miles southeast of Lavenham. 11.  Ibid., fo. 11r–11v (1:31–32). 12.  Ibid., fos. 11v–12r (1:33–34). 13.  Ibid., fos. 12r–13r (1:36–38). His grandfather told Sissilia, who had gone to Coxden for his sake after her mother’s death, that he had dreams in which his wife “came to him & called him to follow her.” 14.  Ibid., fo. 13r & v (1:38–40). 15.  Ibid., fos. 13v–14r (1:40–41). 16.  Ibid., fo. 14r & v (1:41–42). 17.  Ibid., fo. 15r (1:43–44). Simonds added that on several later occasions he warned his father to “beware” falling into the “snare” of entering into “vsurious contracts of what kinde soever.” 18.  Ibid., fo. 15r (1:44). 19.  Ibid., fo. 15v (1:46). 20.  Europe’s Physician: The Various Life of Sir Theodore de Mayerne (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 35 (compare p. 7). 21.  Autobiography., fos. 15v–16r (1:47–48). 22.  Ibid., fo. 16r & v (1:49). 23.  Ibid., fo. 17v (1:55). 24.  Ibid., fo. 19v (1:62). 25.  OED. For a discussion of what Leif Dixon calls “writings about atheism where the term is used as a descriptor of something else,” see his article “William Perkins, ‘Atheisme,’ and the Crises of England’s Long Reformation,” Journal of British Studies 50 (October 2011): 790–812. 26.  Autobiography, fos. 19v–20r (1:62–63). 27.  Ibid., fo. 20v (1:65). 28.  The town is now known as Kedington, just east of Haverhill. Gibson, who had earned his academic degrees (BA, MA, BD, DD) at St. John’s College, Cambridge, was also a preacher in ordinary to King James I and vicar of Little Waldingfield, Suffolk. CCEd, s.v. “Gibson, Abraham.” 29.  Autobiography, fo. 20r (1:63–64). His surname also appears as “Reginald.” ODNB, s.v. “Makin, Bathsua.” D’Ewes attended Bathshuah’s wedding on March 5, 1622. Bourcier, 68–69. 30.  Autobiography, fo. 28r & v (1:94–95). 31.  BL Harl. MS 118, fo. 26v. The exercise books (BL Harl. MS 118–21) are bound in one volume, and he wrote in them between 1616 and 1618. 32.  Ibid., MS 383, fos. 7–8. He signed it “Symonds Dewes.” At this early stage, he spelled his name with a “y” as his grandfather had.

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Notes to Chapter 1 33.  Autobiography, fo. 20v (1:65). Whit Sunday fell on May 28 in 1615. 34.  Ibid., fo. 21r (1:67–68). 35.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 1r. 36. Autobiography, fo. 28v (1:95). In tandem with a fellow student at this time, he also “inuented a strange handwriting consisting of an alphabet of strange letters, which afterwardes I altered alsoe to mine own use & penned seuerall particulars of moment or secresie in it, at all times to this present.” 37.  BL Harl. MS 280, fo. 115. 38.  Ibid., MS 339, fo. 46. At the time of his marriage to Sissilia Symonds on December 10, 1594, Paul D’Ewes made a copy of the marriage sermon preached for them by Mr. Creech, the vicar of Axminster. Ibid., MS 3987, fo. 4v. 39.  Ibid., MS 280, fo. 1r (on 1 Cor. 11:33–34). Simonds supplied a heading as follows: “These Sermons or Notes of Sermons following of Mr Chattertons (being liuing in Cambridg this present yeare 1637. & aged 92. yeares or therabouts) weere written by Paul D’Ewes . . . with his owne hande whilest hee was a student in the vniuersitie of Cambridge as I gather.” The concluding phrase suggests that he discovered these notes after his father’s death in 1631. For his Chaderton notes, see fos. 1–6, 9v–12-v, 14r–21v. For notes of a sermon by Dr. Robert Some on 1 Cor. 3:3 at St. Mary’s, see fo. 7v. For a theological essay in Paul’s hand, see BL Harl. 364, fos. 186–201. 40.  ODNB, s.v. “Gifford, George.” 41. Autobiography, fo. 40r (1:114). 42.  Ibid., fos. 21r–27v (1:67–92). 43.  Ibid., fo. 27r (1:90). 44.  Ibid., fo. 27v (1:91–92). 45. Ibid., fos. 28v–29r (1:96–97). 46.  BL Harl. MS 339, fo. 1v. 47.  Ibid., MS 121, fo. 11r. The material in this book is dated from February 22, 1617, to May 14, 1618. 48.  Autobiography, fos. 30v–31v (1:102–4). He never forgot Mr. Dickenson. Writing from London on March 7, 1639, he instructed Thomas Downes, his steward at Stow Hall, to send twelve shillings to Dickenson in Bury so that he could “pay both the ioiner & the painter & buy a curtaine.” BL Harl. MS 7523, fo. 312r. 49.  Autobiography, fo. 38r (1:106–7). 50.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 28r. In 1623, he persuaded his father to offer a benefice to Holdsworth, “but hee was provided.” Bourcier, 172. 51. Marsden, 34–35. Holdsworth would later serve from 1641 to 1643 as vicechancellor of the University of Cambridge and from 1637 to 1644 as master of Emmanuel College. He was appointed a member of the Westminster Assembly (but did not attend). ODNB. s.v. “Holdsworth, Richard.” 52.  Autobiography, fo. 39r (1:110). 53.  Ibid., fo. 40v (1:116). 54.  Ibid., fo. 39r & v (1:110–11). 55.  Ibid., fo. 40v (1:116). 56.  Ibid., fo. 41r & v (1:118). 57.  Ibid., fo. 38v (1:109). 58.  BL Harl. MS 373, fo. 4r. She dated the letter October 21 but did not supply the year; his stints at London or Bury seem the most likely times for this letter. 59. Autobiography, fo. 41v (1:119). 60.  Ibid., fo. 41v (1:119–20). 61.  Ibid., fo. 41v (1:120). Also Marsden, 65–66.

Notes to Chapter 1 62. Marsden, 37–38. 63.  Autobiography, fo. 42r (1:120). Unfortunately, this book is missing from his papers. A surviving D’Ewes manuscript in the form of a common-place book is a small octavo volume now at the Victoria and Albert Museum (MS Forster 149) that is not the one he referred to here. For another example, see BL Harl. MS 182, which includes, besides Latin and English material, some doodles on fos. 2r, 3r, and 47v. He mentioned that in the summer of 1620 he began to write notes about ethics, politics, and economics in “two great commonplace bookes I had newlie caused to bee bound vpp in folio.” Autobiography, fo. 48r (1:145). I have been unable to locate these. 64.  Autobiography, fos. 41v–42r (1:120). 65. Marsden, 43–44. 66. Autobiography, fo. 42r & v (1:120–22). On Simonds’s reading and Holdsworth’s pedagogy, see William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 66–68. See also Marsden, 64–65. 67. Marsden, 66–68. 68. Autobiography, fo. 16v (1:50–51). In a later diary (1622–24), he asserted that Cecil’s father, Lord Burleigh, had also “plotted” Essex’s destruction. Bourcier, 78. 69.  Ibid., fo. 29r & v (1:97–98). 70.  He purchased his copies of the Latin edition of de Thou in London on July 10, 1633. See ibid., 2:92–93. De Thou’s work looked back, through such memoirwriters as Philippe de Commynes, Blaise de Monluc, and Martin du Bellay, to the model provided by Caesar’s Commentaries. See Thomas F. Mayer and D. R. Woolf, eds., The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 17. 71. Bourcier, 117, 181–82. For his later account of the Synod of Dort, see Autobiography, fo. 30v (1:102). 72.  Autobiography, fo. 42v (1:122–23). 73.  Ibid., fos. 42v–43r (1:123–25). 74.  Ibid., fos. 43r–44r (1:125–28). 75.  Ibid., fo. 45r & v (1:132–34). 76.  Ibid., fo. 46r (1:135). 77.  Ibid., fo. 46r (1:136–37). 78. Marsden, 83. 79. Autobiography, fo. 46v (1:137–38). He had earlier lamented the death of the bishop of Winchester, James Montague, on July 23, 1618. He declared him “a godly bishop and an orthodox, and had he lived to our days, the Church of England had been blessed in his integrity, learning and courage.” Ibid., fo. 44v (1:130). Jefferay (1589–1629) later held several benefices and was a chaplain to Archbishop George Abbot, who made him a canon of Canterbury in 1629. CCEd, s.v. Johannes Jefferay (accessed March 4, 2008). 80. Marsden, 76–77, 91–92, 94–97. When the Trinity men failed to appear for a rematch, some from St. John’s “set upon the back gates of Trinity, and brake them open, and with long poles drove into the college all they found in the walks.” Simonds and other footballers had to pay a small fine, and he decided to forgo the “prejudicious effects” of associating with such colleagues. 81.  Autobiography, fo. 46v (1:137). 82. Marsden, 78–81. 83.  Autobiography, fo. 47r (139–40). 84.  The manuscript of Holdsworth’s treatise, entitled “Directions for a Student in the Universitie,” is in the library of Emmanuel College and was edited and

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Notes to Chapter 1 published by Harris Francis Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 2:623–64. It describes his curricular scheme and his method of teaching and offers savvy tips on such topics as the avoidance of “Debauch’d Carriage, & Ill Company” and of falling into the trap of becoming a student who “will sitt tipling in a Tavern, & be drunk”; see 653–54. 85.  Autobiography, fo. 47r & v (1:140–41). 86.  Ibid., fo. 47v (1:141–42). On the chamber at the Middle Temple, see p. 149. 87.  Ibid., fos. 47v–48r (1:142–44). 88.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 6r. It is likely that this was around the time that he read Christiana polemica, a printed sermon by Gibson that led him to reflect upon the suggestion a friar had given to Martin Luther: “To your cell, brother Luther, to your cell, and there pray.” Marsden, 98. 89.  Autobiography, fos. 48v–49v (1:145–49). Paul told Simonds that his annual income from his office and from land totaled ₤3,000 and that the operation of his household cost only about a third of his income. For a fuller account of his feelings just before his departure from Cambridge, see Marsden, 121–22, which begins “now approaches that gloomy, or rather that fatal day, in which I am to leave my dearest Mother, of whose pure milk I have drank so many months, and fed upon her daintiest bits.” “Daintiest” meant the rarest, choicest, and tastiest morsels.

Chapter 2: “The whole time & minde are filled with law”—1620–1626 1.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 285v. 2. Prest, 48. On the challenges to efforts by James I and others to insist on sumptuary regulations, see ibid., 93–94, 101–3. 3.  J. Bruce Williamson, Middle Temple Hall: Notes upon Its History Collected from Records of the Middle Temple Society, 2d and rev. ed. (London, 1934), 23, 33. See Richard O. Havery, History of the Middle Temple (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2011), 111–13, for a discussion of the thin evidence for Drake’s association with the Middle Temple. A Latin description of his August 4, 1586, appearance at a dinner is reproduced as Plate 1–7. “The cupboard” is still in use. 4. Between 1590 and 1639, the ratio of calls to admissions in the Middle Temple was 1:4.7, a ratio similar to the Inner Temple and Lincoln’s Inn. At Gray’s Inn, it was only 1:10.9. Many students entered with no intention of practicing law and regarded a stay there as part “of the conventional gentlemanly education.” To no small extent, the Inns operated “more like residential clubs or hotels” than modern professional schools. Prest, 52, 23, 16. On the demand for chambers in the early decades of the seventeenth century, see Prest in Havery, History of the Middle Temple, 83–87. On the methods for teaching and learning the law (lectures, moots, and so forth), see 96–99. I am grateful to Wilf Prest for advice on these matters. 5.  Autobiography, fo. 49v (1:149–50). 6.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 6. 7.  Ibid., MS 320, fo. 120. 8.  Johanna (Jone) was named after Simonds’s maternal grandmother. 9. Autobiography, fo. 56v (1:178–79). Simonds here inserted another blast against his father’s “euer to bee condoled tenacitie & loue of monie” because he would not provide a private chamber for his son in London. Simonds defined Sir Thomas Littleton’s French Tenures as “the verie key as it weere of our common law, & accounted the most absolute worke that euer was written touching it.” Ibid., fo. 57r (1:181). 10.  Ibid., fos. 57v–58r , 62v (1:184–85, 205). Despite his disappointment, the unnamed gentleman treated Simonds “verie courteouslie” during his stay. 11.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 8.

Notes to Chapter 2 12. Bourcier, 60. 13. Ibid., 77. 14. Ibid., 95. Dyer (1510–82) was chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas from 1559 until his death, and the book was “an essential possession for every law student.” ODNB, s.v. “Dyer, James.” Simonds’s copy was the abridged version published in 1602. Watson, 172. 15.  Autobiography, fos. 65v–66v (1:218–21). 16. Bourcier, 108 (December 12, 1622). 17. Ibid., 118. 18.  Autobiography, fo. 67r (1:223–24). 19.  For a helpful brief overview of the Inns and legal education at this time, see J. H. Baker, “The Third University 1450–1550,” in Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, and Sarah Knight, , eds., The Intellectual and Cultural World of the Early Modern Inns of Court (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), ch. 1. 20.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 14. This is a draft, and the last digit of the date has been cut off. It may be safely assigned to 1623. Also, Simonds mentioned that he heard Harvey’s lectures late in March 1623. Autobiography, fo. 68v (1:230). 21. Bourcier, 117. 22. Ibid., 137. 23.  Autobiography, fo. 69r (1:232). 24. Bourcier, 143. 25.  His financial leash had indeed been short. The bare minimum for a law student in this period was ₤40. Prest, 27–28. 26.  Autobiography, fo. 69r & v (1:232, 235). 27.  BL Harl. MS 373, fo. 12. 28.  Autobiography, fos. 71r–72r, 74r (1:239–45, 254). 29.  Ibid., fo. 74r (1:251). 30.  Ibid., fos. 89v–90r (1:302–3). 31.  Ibid., fo. 58v (1:188). D’Ewes suspected that the idea of appointing a clergyman came from James’s favorite, George Villiers, Marquis of Buckingham. 32.  Ibid., fo. 62r & v (1:204). 33.  Ibid., fo. 82v (1:281). 34.  Ibid., fo. 90v (1:305). 35.  Ibid., fo. 91r (1:306). 36.  Ibid., fo. 91r & v (1:306–7). 37.  Ibid. fo. 30v (1:102). 38. Ibid., fo. 31v (1:105). Halliwell omitted these from his edition of the autobiography because, he opined, they have “little value in themselves” and have “no interest to the general reader.” For the poems, see Autobiography, fos. 31v–38r. D’Ewes bought de Thou’s Historiarum sui temporis (6 vols., 1620–27) in 1633, read it avidly, and used it as a model for his own autobiography. De Thou, a French Catholic (1553–1617) and politique, advised Henri IV, advocated toleration of Huguenots, and drafted the Edict of Nantes. D’Ewes’s admiration for his writing, philosophy, and library knew no bounds, as will become evident below. 39.  Autobiography, fo. 47r (1:140). 40. Bourcier, 68–69. 41. Ibid., 71–76. Since he and Sir William Ellyott were in full accord on religious matters, the presence of the pamphlet in the latter’s library does not indicate sympathy with its contents. 42. Ibid., 154. 43.  Autobiography, fo. 70r (1:235–36). 44.  Ibid., fo. 47r (1:140).

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Notes to Chapter 2 45. Bourcier, 155, 158, 159, 161, 164, 165. 46. Ibid., 169, 171, 172, 175, 177, 178. 47.  Richard Cust and Andrew Hopper found that “a high proportion of the challenges recorded in the Court of Chivalry records were issued” by young men from the Inns of Court. See their essay “Duelling and the Court of Chivalry in Early Stuart England,” in Stuart Carroll, ed., Cultures of Violence: Interpersonal Violence in Historical Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 162–63. 48.  Ian Atherton, Ambition and Failure in Stuart England: The Career of John, First Viscount Scudamore (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 35. 49. Bourcier, 169–70. His recreations during the succeeding Christmas holiday included fencing. Ibid., 174. On his first meeting with Boldero, see Autobiography, fo. 59v (1:192–93). 50. Bourcier, 190. 51.  Autobiography, fo. 75r (1:255–56). 52.  On Cotton and his library, see Kevin Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton, 1586–1631: History and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), esp. ch. 3. 53.  Autobiography, fo. 78v (1:268–69). 54.  Ibid, fos. 79v, 85r & v, 87r, 88v (1:272, 288–89, 294, 299). 55.  Ibid., fo. 88v (1:299). 56.  Ibid., fo. 76r (1:258). On the Miroir, see R. L. Schuyler, ed., Frederic William Maitland: Historian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 207. Maitland noted that manuscript versions of this treatise had been circulating for some time and that Sir Edward Coke took it quite seriously—more so than he should have. ODNB, s.v. “Tate, Francis.” 57.  Autobiography, fos. 76r, 82r (1:258, 280). Tate’s nephew, Roger Tanfield, was a bencher at the Middle Temple by 1624, and Simonds described him glowingly as “a most honest & learned lawer.” In the summer of 1624, they traveled together to Northamptonshire. Ibid., fos. 71r, 72v (1:240, 246). 58.  Ibid., fo. 82v (1:282). On what he bought from Harrison’s estate and other numismatic purchases, see Watson, 14. D’Ewes wrote “Brissingham,” an alternate and apparently older form of the village’s name. 59.  Autobiography, fo. 73r (1:247–48). 60.  Ibid., fo. 73r (1:248). 61.  Victoria and Albert Museum, MS Forster 149, fo. 36. His fierce insistence on accuracy is evident in his list (on fo. 42) of the “grosse falsities in most pedigrees.” One was putting on coats of arms “the same coulers borne in latter times, as giuen by the most ancient ascendants of the familie; although ther bee not soe much as anye probable tradicion for it.” Another was “to drawe all from Normans when other people entred England with the Conqueror as Flemings, frenchmen, Brittains.” 62. Autobiography, fo. 2r (1:6). The story of his family summarized in his autobiography is largely based on evidence he described more fully in BL Harl. MS 381, fos. 40r–44v. 63.  Autobiography, fo. 4r (1:13–14). 64. Bruce, Review, 81–82. Of several towns named Kessel, the most likely is now in the Dutch province of Limburg on the Maas (south-southwest of Venlo). Halliwell mistranscribed Maze (that is, Maas) as “Mare.” This Kessel does indeed have a ruined castle and is near the old county of Horn, as D’Ewes thought. 65. Bruce, Journal, 331. 66.  Autobiography, fo. 3r & v (1:11). 67.  Ibid., fo. 4r (1:14).

Notes to Chapter 2 68.  Ibid., fo. 3v (1:12). 69. Bruce, Journal, 331. 70.  Autobiography, fo. 4v (1:15–16). The editors of the Proceedings of the First Session of the Long Parliament noticed this feature of D’Ewes’s practice, stating that “his distinction between original and copy was a legal one that he held to passionately” in his Journal of the Elizabethan Parliaments that he began working on in 1629 and finished on February 3, 1632. POSLP 1:xxii. 71.  Autobiography, fo. 3r (1:10). 72.  Ibid., fo. 4r & v (1:15). 73.  Ibid., fo. 3r (1:10–11). 74.  Simonds found it quite frustrating that his father could not remember the Christian name of his mother’s father, or the name of her first husband. Nor did Paul know in what county her land was situated and whether it came to her as a coheiress to her father’s estate or as part of a jointure associated with her first marriage. Simonds’s irritation arose from the fact that if he had some or all of that information, he could add the Hynde shield to the coat-of-arms of his own heirs. Lacking it, his scrupulosity prevented him from enquartering it, despite insisting that “ther is scarce a sheild of the nobility or gentrye of England in which coates are not enquartered vpon lesse ground.” Ibid., fo. 2r & v (1:7–8). 75.  Ibid., fo. 2v (1:8). 76.  Archaeological Journal 26, no. 14 (1869): 325–26. 77.  ODNB, s.v. “D’Ewes, Garrat.” 78.  Autobiography, fo. 5r (1:17–18). 79.  Ibid., fos. 2r–3r (1:7–9). 80.  Ibid., fo. 2v (1:9). 81.  Ibid., fos. 3r, 5r (1:10, 18). He verified that her garb in the picture was Gelderlandish by consulting Sir John Poley, a Norfolk gentleman who “had long serued vnder the States in the Netherlande warrs.” 82.  Ibid., fo. 3r (1:10). 83.  Ibid. fo. 79r (1:270). 84.  Ibid., fo. 3r (1:10). Rebuilt after the 1666 fire by Christopher Wren, St. Michael Bassishaw was incorporated with St. Lawrence Jewry in 1897 and sold in 1899. The area suffered extensive destruction during World War II. The site now lies under the Barbican Centre. Upminster is now a leafy London suburb, and alterations of St. Laurence Upminster have eradicated the D’Ewes presence. Simonds also saw to it that the monument to Geerardt appeared in John Weevor’s Ancient Funerall Monuments (London, 1631), pp. 653–54. That to Adrian and Alice is on p. 698. 85.  Autobiography, fo. 105v (1:356–57). 86.  Ibid., fo. 6r (1:20–21). 87.  Ibid., fo. 6r (1:21). Marginal note. 88.  Ibid., fo. 6v (1:22). 89. Ibid. 90.  Ibid., fos. 86v–87r (1:293–94). On Borough’s later role in the creation of such Caroline fiscal expedients as the forest law revival and distraint of knighthood, see Christopher W. Brooks, Law, Politics and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 193. 91.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 17r. De Vere’s house in Lavenham, Suffolk, has recently been used in a Harry Potter film. He was the nineteenth de Vere to hold the title, and he died in 1632 at the siege of Maestricht. 92.  Ibid., MS 383, fo. 26r. They were John Scott and William Beeston. D’Ewes had first met Mede early in January 1626 when the Cambridge scholar was visiting

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Notes to Chapter 2 the Stutevilles at Dalham during the Christmas vacation. Mede introduced the young man to the study of Hebrew on that occasion. Autobiography, fo. 85r (1:289). 93.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 10r. 94.  Ibid., MS 388, fo. 96r. The letter is undated, but the mention of Simonds’s “lady” at the end argues that it was written after his marriage on October 24. 95.  Ibid., fos. 85v–86r (1:289–91). 96.  Mayerne’s Huguenot parents fled from Lyons to the safety of Geneva in 1572, and their son was named after Theodore Beza (who preached at his christening). He took part in the autopsies of both Henry IV of France and John Pym. Hugh Trevor-Roper, Europe’s Physician: The Various Life of Sir Theodore de Mayerne (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 16–17, 6. 97.  Quoted in Geoffrey Parker, ed., The Thirty Years’ War, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1997), xv. 98.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 17r. The phrase is from one of his many letters from London to Sir Martin Stuteville at Dalham, Suffolk. 99.  Autobiography, fos. 49v–50r (1:150–51). He stated that he saw the letter in question on October 25, but the battle in fact occurred on October 29 (old style, or November 8 new style). So he must have misremembered the date. The most likely explanation is that he saw the letter on November 25 rather than October 25. 100.  Ibid., fo. 50 (1:151–52). Halliwell mistranscribed “Silesia” as “Siberia.” D’Ewes’s source overestimated Frederick’s resources at the time of the battle. According to Peter H. Wilson, the site of the battle is in fact eight kilometers west of Prague, and Duke Maximilian and Tilly went into the fight with twenty-three thousand troops to Frederick’s twenty-one thousand. Wilson, 303–4. 101.  Autobiography, fo. 50v (1:153). 102. Bourcier, 142. Emphasis added. 103.  Autobiography, fo. 58r (1:185). 104. Bourcier, 85, 176. 105. Ibid., 111–12. At the same time, Simonds saw a copy of the terms being negotiated for the match and described them as “base and vile, being indeed but to bring in poperie, under covert termes.” 106.  Autobiography, fo. 60v (1:154). I am grateful to David Coast for drawing my attention to this passage. 107. Bourcier, 185 (March 6, 1623/24). 108.  For at least a generation, scholarly interest in this scribal culture has been increasing. The practice of obtaining news via newsletters and “separates” continued long after the advent of print because official interference with the activities of the denizens of London’s proto–Grub Street was persistent and often effective. See Richard Cust’s “News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present, no. 112 (August 1986): 60–90. Cust points out that before the 1640s, “the printing of domestic news was tightly controlled by the privy council” and the pamphlets containing foreign news (known as “corantoes”) that did get licenses “dealt only with foreign affairs, and were generally careful to avoid controversial topics lest they forfeit their licenses” (62). 109. Bourcier, 126. In his autobiography, he said that he had read it on December 4, 1620, and produced a longer discussion of its contents. Autobiography, fo. 51r & v (1:158–59). Whether he actually knew the author’s name that early or heard it later on is uncertain. 110.  Autobiography, fo. 51v (1:158–59). 111. Bourcier, 142, 167–68. 112.  BL Harl. MS 385, fo. 3. The letter is undated. Since James died on Sunday,

Notes to Chapter 2 March 27, 1625, at Theobalds, and Albyn mentions events that occurred on the succeeding Monday and Tuesday, he probably wrote it at the end of the month or early in April. He also noted that “the french Lady shall be sent hether with all speed” (that is, Charles’s bride-elect, Henrietta Maria). For another newsy letter from Albyn, see fo. 5 in this volume, and for evidence that Simonds was still doing business with Albyn in the 1630s, see fos. 100, 132. For Simonds’s intense interest in the death of James I (including the results of the autopsy), see Autobiography, fos. 77r–78r (1:262–65). 113. Bourcier, 104. He was referring to a sea battle between Louis XIII’s fleet and that of the Rochellais. 114. Ibid., 145. 115. Ibid., 165. On his way from Portsmouth, Boldero had spent the previous night at the Ellyotts’ home in Surrey. 116. Ibid., 156. 117. Ibid., 188 (March 25, 1624). The conversation with the prince that Holland heard had occurred on March 15. Charles indicated that a declaration “concerning the breach of the treaties with Spaine” was being drafted, and Simonds got a copy of it from Sir Robert Cotton. This declaration was not sent because James’s death intervened, but Simonds was pleased that “a present of Spanish sweetemeates” that Olivares sent to Charles at this time was quickly rejected. 118.  BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 18. This letter was written from the camp at Rosendael on November 20, 1624 and provided details about the size of the Dutch army and the work of such English officers as Essex, Southampton, Oxford, and Willoughby. Beeston opined that Maurice had an excellent opportunity to take Antwerp, and his failure to bestir himself led Beeston to write that he would always think of him the “Dutch coward.” Beeston probably did not know that Maurice’s health was failing. He died less than six months later. Wilson, 365. Both the earl of Southampton and his son died soon after Beeston wrote this letter. See also Marsden, 113–14, for an account of an earlier meeting of Simonds and Beeston in 1620. 119.  BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 16v. fo. 16v. This letter contained an extensive report on military and political developments in the Netherlands. 120.  Ibid., MS 376, fo. 128. 121.  Ibid., MS 378, fo. 26. 122. Bourcier, 147. 123.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 15; BL Harl. MS 373, fo. 11. 124. Bourcier, 147. 125.  Ibid. A. G. Watson listed this manuscript as “not found” (Watson, 238), but Bourcier located it as BL Additional Manuscripts 4149 (which had belonged to Ralph Starkey). Since D’Ewes later bought a substantial part of Starkey’s collection, it is possible that this volume was in his library but somehow detached from it before finding its way back into the BL. 126.  Add MS 4149, fos. 286v, 285r. 127.  Ibid., fos. 284r–289r. 128. Bourcier, 141. 129. Ibid., 170–71. 130.  Autobiography, fo. 79v (1:272–73). 131.  BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 45r. The letter is undated but must have been written in August 1626, the queen’s French servants having been sent away on July 31. On the dorse, Simonds wrote: “send this letter immediatlie to Mr: Mead at Christ: Colledg soe to be sent to Dalham.” This is one of several indications that he was part of Mede’s network of sources. A number of Mede’s newsletters are in his papers.

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Notes to Chapter 2 132.  BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 24r & v. For the briefer narration in the autobiography, see fo. 86r & v (1:291–93). 133. Ibid. 134.  Autobiography, fo. 86v (1:293). 135. Bourcier, 56. 136. Ibid., 56–57. In the autobiography, he regretted the dissolution and mentioned the king’s accident but said nothing about the earlier assertion that it indicated divine displeasure for “his coolenes in religion.” BL Harl. MS 646 (1:212). 137. Bourcier, 58–59. 138. Ibid., 92–93. 139. Ibid., 113. 140. Ibid., 119. 141.  Autobiography, fos. 77v–78r (1:264–65). Similarly, in an account of James’s speech at the opening of the Parliament of 1621, D’Ewes described him as “a Prince whose pietie learning & gracious gouerment after ages may misse & wish for.” Ibid., fo. 54v (1:171–72). He was very interested in rumors that James had died of poison and collected information about his autopsy. See BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 28; and Autobiography, fo. 77r & v (1:263–64). 142.  Autobiography, fo. 54v (1:170–71). 143.  BL Harl. MS 374, fo. 55. 144. Bourcier, 58. 145. Ibid., 174. Entry for January 7. 146.  BL Harl. MS 159 is a fair copy of a journal of the proceedings of the Parliament of 1624 written mostly by a clerk but with numerous emendations in D’Ewes’s hand. Fos. 59r & v and 60r are entirely in his hand, as is the list of additional grievances presented on fos. 45 and 46. Some of D’Ewes’s entries add information or substitute for the clerk’s text (for example, fos. 32r & v and 35v, 38v–41v, 59r–60r); others appear to be for use in identifying the subject matter being debated. 147.  Autobiography, fo. 82r (1:280). 148. Bourcier, 180, 181, 182. For further references to this journal, see 184, 185. 149. Ibid., 184–85. This entry also contains Simonds’s remarks about how Bristol had, after his return from Spain, “cleared himselfe and accused the duke of Buckingham of high treason itselfe” during the Parliament of 1626. Bourcier plausibly argues that entries such as this one show that the cipher diary was written up later, although based on notes made at the time. Throughout the autobiography, he recorded events by both day of week and date. This indicates that he probably kept diaries like the one Bourcier transcribed and edited for 1622– 24 for the entire period and used them when he was writing the autobiography from 1636–38. He may have discarded all except this one after finishing the autobiography, and its survival is accidental. 150.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 10. 151.  Ibid., fo. 11. 152.  Autobiography, fo. 72v (1:246). 153. Bourcier, 139. 154.  Autobiography, fo. 81v (1:279). 155.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 17r. The letter is undated, but the debate on the bill for scandalous ministers was discussed on February 14 and 15. It also refers to a discussion of “Sir Edward Cokes busines,” likely the attempt to prevent him from sitting by pricking him for sheriff. On the mushrooming flow of information about the parliaments of the 1620s and the role of Mede, Stuteville, and D’Ewes in it, see Chris R. Kyle, Theater of State: Parliament and Political Culture in Early Stuart England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), ch. 4.

Notes to Chapter 2 156.  BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 26. 157.  Ibid., fo. 31r. 158.  Ibid., fo. 31v. 159.  Ibid., fo. 32r. He closed by asking Stuteville to have a copy made of the articles and sent to Dr. Gibson. He also told Stuteville that Sir Robert Cotton had that same morning said to him that Charles’s love of Buckingham was “noe whit lessened” and that “hee will never yeild to the Dukes fall, being a yong man resolute magnanimous, & tenderlie & firmelie affectionate where he takes.” Although Simonds’s letter is dated May 2, the imprisonment of Eliot and Digges came on May 11, suggesting that the two postscripts were added over the course of nine days at least. For a vivid description of this tumultuous episode, see Russell, PEP, 303–7. 160.  Autobiography, fo. 89r (1:301). 161. Bourcier, 56. 162. Ibid., 113. This was before White lined up alongside the anti-Calvinist group of clergymen. See Tyacke, 174–80. 163. Bourcier, 41 (June 15, 1623). 164. Ibid., 129, 137. 165. Ibid., 84. Simonds expressed irritation that at about this time William Knight had been disciplined at Oxford for a sermon in which he said “that if the King of France weere slaine before Rochell walls it weere an execution but not a murther” while Lucy’s offensive sermon drew no censure. On Lucy’s Arminianism, see Tyacke, 46. 166. Bourcier, 181–82. 167. Ibid., 64–65. This may have been Leonell Sharpe (d. 1631), fellow of King’s College, Cambridge (1579–89), and a renowned orator. ODNB, s.v. “Sharpe, Leonell.” D’Ewes bought a copy of Edward Coffin’s A true relation of the last sickness and death of Cardinal Bellarmine (1621) (Watson, 234). The relevant passage of Coffin’s translation of the cardinal’s will reads: “First therefore, I desire with all my hart, to have my soule commended into the hands of God, whome from my youth I have desired to serve; and I beseech him, not as the valewer of merit, but as a giver of pardon, to admit me amongst his Saints and Elect.” Another layman and MP, Francis Rous, referred to the same alleged sentiments of Bellarmine and Gardiner in his treatise Diseases of the Time (1622), 188. He repeated them in his Catholick Charity (1641), 412. 168. Bourcier, 94–95. D’Ewes’s library contained a copy of “Mr Wards picture.” Watson, 232. 169. Bourcier, 187. 170. Ibid., 141, 96, 130–31, 145. 171.  Autobiography, fo. 70v (1:239). 172. Bourcier, 114–15. 173. Ibid., 186. 174. Ibid., 70–74. Compare 90, 103, 110, 125, 130, 142, 150, 167, 175, 181. 175. Ibid., 107. 176. Ibid., 130. Compare 116, 135. 177. Ibid.,149–50. A similar experience occurred during the Christmas season of 1622–23. Simonds was elected by his fellow students to the honor of being the “leifetenant” of the festive season at the Middle Temple, meaning that he had to pay for some expensive eating and drinking. Initially, he was frustrated by his father’s refusal to give him the money he would need to acquit himself with honor in this office. Forced to decline it, he then had to endure the resulting obloquy and felt such “melancholye” that he withdrew from the Middle Temple and lodged with a friend for several days. He then heard a sermon about “the abuse of this

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Notes to Chapter 2 time of Christmas” in excessive festivities and realized that through this painful experience, God had mercifully led him to the realization that he should never have been willing to accept the office in the first place: “I beganne to see mine owne follye, and to blesse God that I was not leifetenant, seeing the inevitable vanities that weere in it.” Ibid., 108–12. 178. Ibid., 130, 186, 188. The latter occasion was the same day as the death of Richard Sackville, earl of Dorset, “a good comonwelthsman, though not a strickt liver; by the hands of God hee surfeited of a potato pie which meate hee had often eaten as was reported to enkindle his lust.” 179. Ibid., 131. He tried to hear John Preston at Lincoln’s Inn several times, but missed him. See p. 170. 180. Prest,197–201. In Prest’s view, “Micklethwaite and perhaps Gibson displayed puritan leanings at an early stage of their careers,” and Micklethwaite “could still be classified as a sympathizer when he became master in 1628.” By the mid-1630s, however, he was defending Laudian ceremonialism (p. 201, n. 51). 181.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 6. 182.  Ibid., MS 373, fo. 11. 183.  Ibid., MS 388, fo. 102. At this time, Smith had just started serving as schoolmaster to young Richard D’Ewes, aged eight. 184.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 10. 185.  Ibid., MS 385, fos. 74–75. 186.  Ibid., MS 379, fo. 28r. 187.  Ibid., MS 388, fo. 133. 188.  Ibid., fo. 135. A letter from Paul at Stow Hall to Simonds at the Middle Temple dated August 17, 1624, mentions that “at this time Mr Jeffery hath been at Stowhall a full and a fair weeke preached at Hunston once at stow twise.” Since Tilman was already in possession of Stowlangtoft, it is possible that Simonds was trying to get his friend Jefferay the benefice at nearby Hunston at this time. BL Harl. MS 373, fo. 14. When on vacation late in July, Simonds noted that when he went to Cambridge from Stow Hall on July 28, he dined with his friends Jefferay and Tilman at Pembroke College, Tilman being “at this time our minister at Stowlangtoft.” Autobiography, fo. 74r (1:250). 189.  Autobiography, fo. 46v (1:137). 190.  Ibid., fo. 73r & v (1:249). In this passage, Halliwell misread “causally” for “casually.” Kediton (now Kedington) is also spelled “Ketton” in some of Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston’s letters. 191.  “Calvinism and the English Church, 1570-1635,” in Past and Present, no. 114 (1987). 192.  Autobiography, fo. 73v (1:249). 193.  Ibid. fo. 73v (1:250). 194.  BL Harl. MS 189, fo. 4r & v. 195.  Autobiography, fo. 74r & v (1:251–53). 196. Venn, 1:302. 197.  Autobiography, fo. 81r (1:276). 198. Ibid. 199.  Ibid., fo. 81r (1:277). I am grateful to David Como for advice on this matter. 200.  BL Harl. MS. 374, fols. 61–63. 201.  Ibid., fo. 61v. 202.  Ibid., fo. 61r. 203.  Autobiography, fo. 81r (1:277). He did send the letter to Cartwright while keeping a copy for himself, and Cartwright seems to have let matters rest there. 204.  BL Harl. MS 373, fo. 11.

Notes to Chapter 2 205. Autobiography, fos. 83r–84v (1:283). This brother was John Ashfield, whose father had sold Stow Hall and the manor of Stowlangtoft to Paul D’Ewes in 1614. This and the following paragraph, except where otherwise indicated, are based on Simonds’s account in the Autobiography, fos. 83r–85r (1:283–88). 206.  ODNB, s.v. “Ogle, John.” Sir Richard, who had been knighted by James I on April 23, 1603, and served as sheriff of Lincolnshire in 1608, died in the Fleet in 1627. Simonds does not say when the imprisonment began, but it must have been before 1616. 207.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 8. He wrote in similar terms to offer support to Sir Martin Stuteville after learning of what he called Stuteville’s “late loss” on February 27, 1626. He expressed his confidence that his friend should “bee comforted” by believing that “this crosse that it hath pleased the divine hand to lay upon yow, is such as may justlie lead yow into the closett of your owne heart there to search & carefullie take care for the future; being an admonition which is alwayes in mercie.” BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 19. 208.  See Michael MacDonald, “The Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira: Narrative, Identity, and Emotion in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 31, no. 1 (January 1992): 32–61. 209.  Autobiography, fo. 51r & v (1:158–59). 210.  Ibid., fo. 55v (1:175). 211.  BL Harl. MS 373, fo. 30. The letter is undated, but internal evidence ties it to the period of negotiation over Simonds’s marriage to Anne Clopton—that is, summer of 1626. 212. Ibid., fo. 3. Clopton’s letter was written from Horseheath in Cambridgeshire, but his seat was Kentwell Manor, very near Lavenham. Clopton would have known that D’Ewes owned the manor of Lavenham and came there often from Stowlangtoft. 213.  For a fascinating account of another failed marriage negotiation, see Isaac Stephens, “The Courtship and Singlehood of Elizabeth Isham, 1630–1634,” HJ 51 (March 2008): 1–25. 214.  Autobiography, fo. 48v (1:146). 215.  BL Cotton Charter XVI.13, fos. 8r, 14v. In England, an ell was forty-five inches long. The second trip to Lawford Hall cost £3 8s 0d and a new scarlet cloak and doublet (£13 2s 8d). 216.  Autobiography, fos. 59v–60r (1:192–95). 217.  Ibid., fo. 57v (1:184). 218.  Ibid., fo. 62r (1:203). 219.  Ibid., fo. 60v (1:196). Whether this “treaty” involving Paul was the one with Lady Mary Prince or a different one is uncertain. In addition, Simonds noted on February 15, 1622, that he had heard from a friend that there was “some better hope of my fathers not marriing the former young woman, which did a little comfort mee.” Bourcier, 65. 220.  Ibid., fo. 45v (1:134). 221.  BL Harl. MS 373, fo. 38. The correspondence between them runs from this letter to fo. 53. Paul died in 1631, after which his papers became part of Simonds’s library. So Simonds may have read these letters to Mary Prince after the danger was long past. Dates and other notes in his hand appear occasionally on his father’s papers (although not on this particular set of letters). 222.  Ibid., fo. 40. 223.  Ibid., fo. 41. In this letter and the next one, he referred to the fire at the Six Clerks’ Office. Since it had occurred on December 20, 1621, it is probable that these letters were written in April 1622. Easter fell on April 21 in 1622.

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Notes to Chapter 2 224.  Ibid., fo. 45. This letter was addressed to “my worthy good Lady Mary Lady Prince at her Lodging neere the Savoy in the Strand.” Beginning with this sheet and through fo. 49v, there is damage that obscures parts of the letters and makes them impossible to transcribe fully. 225.  Ibid., fo. 46. In the next letter (fo. 48), which he wrote after returning to London, Paul told Mary that he had suffered a severe illness from which he nearly died. He begged her to come to visit him because visiting the sick was “the highest charyty.” It is possible that this letter should have been placed earlier in the sequence, but otherwise the series of undated letters in BL Harl. MS 373 may be in the correct order. 226.  Ibid., fo. 51. 227.  Ibid., fo. 50. 228.  Ibid., fo. 52. Because these letters are undated, it is impossible to be certain that this was her response to his denunciation. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable that it fairly represents her attitude toward him. 229. Bourcier, 110. 230. Ibid., 66, 71. 231. Ibid., 105. 232. Ibid., 121. 233.  BL Harl. MS 384, fo. 198. 234.  Autobiography, fo. 68r (1:228). 235. Bourcier, 123. 236. Ibid., 124. 237.  BL Harl. MS 373, fo. 102. According to Simonds, Lady Denton was fortyfive at the time of her marriage to Paul. Autobiography, fo. 68r (1:228). 238. Bourcier, 178. 239.  Autobiography, fo. 88v (1:299). 240.  Ibid., fo. 91v (1:308). He later noted that Anne’s land yielded £600 a year. BL Harl. MS 381, fo. 39r. 241.  Autobiography, fo. 88r & v (1:297–98). 242.  Ibid., fos. 92r–93r (1:309–12). 243.  Ibid., fo. 93r & v (1:312–14). 244.  BL Harl. 373, fo. 30. 245.  Autobiography, fo. 96r (1:314–16). 246.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 21. 247.  Autobiography, fos. 94v–95v (1:317–20).

Chapter 3: “To dippe my pen in teares not inke”—1626–1631 1.  Autobiography, fos. 96v–97r (1:323–24). Not until 1637 did he establish “a clear and rare descent” from the reign of Henry II to the seventeenth century for the Bokenhams. See ibid., fos. 133v–34v (2:13–16). 2. Ibid., fos. 96v–97r (1:323–25). Bowes, of Much Bromley in Essex, was knighted on July 19, 1630. Ibid., fo. 97r (1:324). Daniel Mytens the Elder painted his portrait (ca. 1630). 3.  BL Harl. MS 384, fo. 21r. This letter was dated September 9, 1626. 4.  BL Cotton Charter XVI.13, fo. 15r. 5.  Autobiography, fo. 97r (1:325). 6.  Ibid., fo. 104r (1:350–51). 7.  BL Harl. MS 384, fo. 23r. Although the letter is undated, it must have been written in November 1626 because, as indicated above, Lady Barnardiston had traveled to Albury Lodge on November 1, and the newlyweds arrived there early in December.

Notes to Chapter 3 8.  Autobiography, fos. 104v–5r (1:352–53). Ibid., fo. 159r (2:102). There is no indication that he was aware of Mason’s Arminian affiliations. See Tyacke, 184 and ODNB, s.v. “Mason, Henry.” 9.  Autobiography, fo. 159r (2:102). 10.  Ibid., fo. 105r (1:353–54). 11.  Ibid., fo. 41v (1:118). 12.  BL Harl. MS 339, fo. 38r. This letter is undated, but it continues the discussion of topics addressed in the preceding letter, which is dated May 4, 1627. At this time, however, Simonds quarreled with Chamberlain when he accused the elderly preacher of offending the godly by practicing usury. Chamberlain apologetically replied by agreeing that abusive usury was a “great oppression,” but that nonabusive usury was customary in “Geneva, France reformed, Helvetia” and parts of Germany that had the “best godly ministers and learned divines.” Citing Melanchthon and Calvin, he distinguished between what he had done—which seems to have involved the purchase of an annuity for himself and his wife—and the kind of oppressive usury that was unacceptable. Ibid., fo. 37v. 13.  Ibid., MS 189, fo. 5r & v. He seems to have discarded the English draft of his essay. 14.  Autobiography., fo. 109v (1:369). 15.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 16r. 16.  Ibid., MS 189, fo. 3r & v. 17.  Ibid., fo. 4r. 18.  Ibid., fo. 5r. 19.  The Breast-Plate of Faith and Love (London, 1631), part 3, 132. 20.  Ibid., part 2, 89. 21.  Autobiography, fo. 127r (1:430). 22.  BL Harl. MS 189, fo. 10v. He expanded upon this point in number sixteen, writing that “I began to love the canonical books of the old and new testament most eagerly” and “believed them to be the true word of eternal God in themselves and by themselves, both pure, health giving and holy, and that they contain absolutely everything necessary for salvation.” He asserted that the “agreement and harmony” among the books was the more impressive because they were “written by divers people long distant from each other, even at one and the same time”; fo. 18r. 23.  Ibid., fos. 10v-11r. 24.  Ibid., fo. 3v. 25.  Gerald Bray, ed., Documents of the English Reformation (Cambridge: James Clarke and Son, 2004), 290. 26.  BL Harl. MS 189, fos. 14r, 21v. 27.  The Breast-Plate of Faith and Love, part 3, 102–3. 28.  BL Harl. MS 189, fos. 19r & v, 21r. 29.  Ibid., fo. 22r. 30.  Ibid., fo. 29v. 31.  Ibid., MS 383, fo. 57r (May 5, 1629). 32.  BL Harl. MS 189, fos. 6r–8v. He mistakenly believed that Sweden was Calvinist rather than Lutheran. See below, pp. 161–62. 33. Ibid. 34.  Ibid., fos. 35r–36r. 35.  Autobiography, fo. 108r (1:363). 36.  BL Harl. MS 189, fos. 8v–9r. Compare Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. Diana Greenway (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 79, 85. This

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Notes to Chapter 3 twelfth-century historian gave 457 as the date for the mission of Germanus and Lupus to Britain. 37. Autobiography, fos. 110v–11r (1:373–74). The marginal notes to the “Indications” cite Bede, Giraldus Cambrensis, and other sources for this period. 38.  Ibid., fo. 110v (1:373). Halliwell omitted this marginal correction. For Simonds’s extracts from this work, see Harl. MS 624, fos. 3r–20v, 36r–53r. 39.  BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 55r. 40.  Ibid., fo. 56r. 41.  Autobiography, fo. 29v (1:98). 42.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 278r. 43.  Primitive Practise, 4, 34. 44.  BL Harl. MS 593, fo. 41v. 45.  Ibid., MS 383, fo. 113v. The context here was a debate about the religious position of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden that is discussed below. D’Ewes read Stuteville as having asserted that consubstantiation was “more odious” than transubstantiation. From D’Ewes’s viewpoint, however, the latter had “filled Gods church with idolatrie & depriued the people of the cupp, which the former did not.” 46.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 249. 47.  Ibid., MS 375, fo. 29. Castellio died in 1563 and Bertius in 1629. 48. The tendency of seventeenth-century theologians to link up heresies with each other in this way is well known. See, for example, the Synod of Dort’s condemnation of Vorstius for his defense of Arminian tenets and his “very neere bordering upon the blasphemies of the balefull heretique Socinus.” Anthony Milton, ed., The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618–1619) (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press/Church of England Record Society, 2005), 348. See also Jan Rohls, “Calvinism, Arminianism and Socinianism in the Netherlands until the Synod of Dort,” in Martin Mulsow and Jan Rohls, eds., Socinianism and Arminianism: Antitrinitarians, Calvinists and Cultural Exchange in SeventeenthCentury Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 3–48. 49.  BL Harl. MS 373, fo. 89. The one bit of political news in this letter—the extension of the prorogation of the second session of the 1628 Parliament—helps date it to the week or so after October 8. 50.  Autobiography, fo. 110r (1:371). 51.  Ibid., fo. 104v (1:351–52); 109v (1:369–70). 52.  Ibid., fos. 103v–4r (1:348). The role of the missed payments reached him not via Joachimi but from Colonel John Poley, who commanded a regiment of foot at Lutter. John was a younger brother of Simonds’s brother-in-law Sir William Poley. 53.  Ibid. fo. 104v (1:351). 54.  BL Harl. MS 287, fo. 261r. 55.  Ibid. I have found no other references to this work, but this was precisely the moment when opposition to the Forced Loan was boiling over. As Richard Cust has demonstrated, there were pamphlets circulating in manuscript that placed heavy blame on the duke for the loan. A Canterbury Puritan, Thomas Scott, wrote a treatise against the loan that, among other things, savagely attacked the duke. If a printer had issued all or some part of Scott’s work (with or without his permission), this might explain D’Ewes’s report to Stuteville. See Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626–1628 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 175–85. 56. BL Harl. MS 373, fo. 30r. On these privy seal loan demands, which immediately preceded the Forced Loan campaign that the Privy Council launched in September 1626, see Cust, 35–39. 57.  BL Harl. MS 373, fo. 139r. Paul said nothing about how the total demand

Notes to Chapter 3 was apportioned among the Six Clerks, but Simonds mentioned that his father’s share of the requested sum was more than ₤1,000. Autobiography, fo. 107r (1:361). 58.  BL Harl. MS 373, fo. 141r. The fact that it was to have been paid annually sweetened the deal for the king while making it manageable for the legal bureaucrats. The horrified tone of the first letter contrasts sharply with Paul’s genial mood in the second, where he wrote: “I did counterfaite a smile when I Read how much my Troubles, did trouble yow.” Since the clerks’ payments were to come from “such Rents as are reserued vpon the sales of the fee simple of diuerse Mannors wherin we suppose we are safest for the Maine,” they may have gained wiggle room that could prove helpful. 59.  Ibid., MS 383, fo. 49. 60. Gardiner, History, 6:198–99. 61.  Autobiography, fo. 108r (1:363–64). 62.  Ibid., fo. 108v (1:364–65). 63.  Ibid., fos. 108v–9v (1:365–68). 64.  Ibid., fo. 110r & v (1:371–72). 65.  BL Harl. MS 385, fo. 56r. 66.  In an undated letter to D’Ewes (Harley MS 387, fo. 127), Spring described how he was “sent for to Towne to be there about twelve of ye clocke.” Spring’s home at Pakenham was less than a mile from D’Ewes’s at Stowlangtoft. Once there, a frenetic discussion of how many “voyces” could be counted on ensued. The result was that “I had 17 he 18,” although a dispute about some of the votes and whether certain promises had been kept followed. Another undated letter from Spring, which he wrote in great haste, reported that he had “15 voyces” committed thanks to support from the Barnardistons and hoped that Simonds would intervene with “one Jeremiah Stafford . . . ouer whom you haue a great power.” Ibid., MS 384, fo. 191. The year 1625 is the most likely date for these, since he represented Bury in that parliament. 67.  BL Harl. MS 378, fo. 29v. D’Ewes’s Latin letter to Spring congratulating him on his election was written at Stow Hall on April 15, 1628. Ibid., fo. 29. 68.  Ibid., MS 383, fo. 59r & v. An unsigned and undated letter (written at Bury during the election and probably by Stuteville) reported the news of the election of Barnardiston and Coke at Ipswich. The writer asserted that Coke’s election was in direct opposition to the statute that required that the shire knight be a resident of the county. Nevertheless, he wrote that “I stirred not in it” because “it is now done, and tyme will shew the successe; it is most vnsesonable to continue jelosies, and distractions betweene the king and his people, it hath binn practised to long: ther is nothing (our sinnes excepted) that giues our enemies more aduantage against vs.” Ibid., fo. 55v. 69.  Autobiography, fos. 111v–12r (1:377–78). 70.  Ibid., fo. 111r (1:374–75). 71.  BL Harl. MS 339, fo. 102r. Fo. 106r has a slightly revised version of the first part of this prolegomenon, and I have here inserted most of the changes it contains. Simonds cited a wide range of authorities, from relatively contemporary writers such as Holinshed, Camden, Calvin, Sarpi, and Brightman (as well as documents such as Walsingham’s letters and the earl of Essex’s Apology) to various classical writers (including Xenophon and Seneca). 72.  Ibid., fo. 102r & v. 73.  Ibid., fos. 102v–3r. 74.  Ibid., fos. 103v–4r. 75.  Ibid., fo. 104r. 76.  Ibid., fo. 104r & v.

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Notes to Chapter 3 77.  Ibid. MS 377, fo. 233v. One of the sources he read that condemned Spanish ambition was Raleigh’s History of the World. D’Ewes’s notes from Raleigh read: “The Spaniard labours for a monarchie. 2. The Spaniard hath laboured for it ever since his Indian golde came in. 3. Hee aimes to roote out true religion.” Ibid. MS 593, fo. 53. 78.  Autobiography, fo. 112r (1:379–80). 79.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 236. Brightman (1562–1607) was a Cambridge graduate and clerical nonconformist. His influential and massive Apocalypsis apocalypseos was published in Latin at Frankfurt in 1609 and established him as England’s first major academic millenarian. Dr. Joseph Mede (or Meade) of Christ’s College Cambridge was in some respects Brightman’s intellectual heir as well as being the leader of a team of newshounds that at times included Simonds. 80.  Ibid., fo. 234. 81.  Autobiography, fo. 112r & v (1:380, 381). 82.  Ibid., fo. 113r (1:382). 83.  Ibid., fo. 114r (1:386–87). 84.  Ibid., fo. 113r (1:382). 85.  Ibid., fo. 113v (1:384–85). 86.  Ibid., fo. 113r (1:382–83). 87.  Ibid., fo. 113v (1:383–84). 88.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 238v. 89.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 239r. D’Ewes’s sympathy for Felton was widely shared in and beyond London. See Thomas Cogswell, “John Felton, Popular Political Culture, and the Assassination of the Duke of Buckingham,” HJ 49 (2006): 357– 85. Cogswell shows how a “scandalous genre” of libelous poems and pamphlets against Buckingham “had spread like intellectual crabgrass across the political nation” (p. 383). 90.  Autobiography, fo. 114r (1:385–86). 91.  Ibid., fos. 114v & 115r (1:388–89). 92.  Ibid., fo. 114r (1:385). 93.  Ibid., fo. 115v (1:391). 94.  Ibid., fo. 116r & v (1:393–94, 395). 95.  Ibid., fos. 116v–17r (1:395–96). 96.  Ibid., fo. 117v (1:398). Heyn’s feat happened early in September 1628, and his fleet returned in January 1629. The raising of the siege of Stralsund occurred in August, not, as Simonds wrote, on May 20. 97.  BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 76. D’Ewes’s papers include numerous newsletters from Pory to Mede and other indications of his participation in Mede’s news network. See, for example, ibid., fos. 61–78, 80–81. A letter from Mede to Stuteville (fo. 79) confirms that he planned to spend Christmas with the Stutevilles at Dalham. 98.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 239. 99.  Autobiography, fo. 126r (1:427). 100. Ibid., fo. 118r (1:399–400). After January 27, the MPs shifted their discussion to religious grievances, and the speeches made by John Pym, Francis Rous, Nathaniel Rich, Robert Harley, and Christopher Sherland are probably those D’Ewes had in mind here. See Russell, PEP, 404–12. 101. Autobiography, fos. 118v–19r (1:402). Simonds’s use of the word “present” here hints that he might have been writing from notes made in 1629. On the evocative phrase (“fierie spirits”), see below, 365–68, 393–96. The mention of eight years and five months also shows that he was writing this part of his autobiography late in 1637. A mid-March letter (that Simonds probably read)

Notes to Chapter 3 from young Justinian Isham in London to his uncle, Paul D’Ewes, offers a lively depiction of the events of March 3. See BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 82. 102.  Autobiography, fos. 118v–20r (1:402–6). In his discussion of those guilty for the “breach,” D’Ewes mentioned by name only two MPs: John Selden and William Noy. “How they stood affected . . . to the power & puritie of Religion, I leaue it to ther owne consciences, though I could say enough of them both, & somewhat of mine owne knowledge.” He added acidly that whereas “some Prelates” had formerly excoriated Selden’s “learned & vnanswearable Bookes of Tithes,” after he served their turn in the 1629 session they did an about face and made him “the man of ther fauour and esteeme.” And he then twisted the knife he had inserted into these prelates by quoting a speech that the late duke of Buckingham had made before Charles I during the 1628 session of parliament. The duke had told the king that “the meanes for him to bee feared abroad was to bee loued at home.” Ibid., fo. 119v–20r (1:406–7). 103.  Ibid., fo. 120r & v (1:407–8). 104.  BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 84. The signature on the letter is illegible, but its contents indicate that it must have come from London. 105.  Ibid., fo. 57r. D’Ewes dated the draft May 5, 1628, but this is an error because the events discussed occurred in the spring of 1629. These included the news that the queen “was the last weeke in great state conveied to Greenwich by water wheere shee intends to lay downe her roiall burthen.” At the end of May 1629, her first pregnancy ended with the birth of a child who lived only two hours. 106. Autobiography, fos. 121v–22r (1:413–14). As indicated above, D’Ewes named only Selden and Noy as MPs deserving blame for the dissolution, although he certainly knew of Eliot’s leading role in the affair. 107.  BL Harl. MS 374, fo. 69r & v. The scriptural reference is to Joel 2:17. 108.  Ibid., fos. 69v–71r. 109.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 240. 110.  Ibid., MS 375, fo. 15. 111.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 243v. 112.  Ibid., fo. 243. On the relevant military actions, see Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World, 1606–1661 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 174–79. 113.  Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 507. The Spaniards “had poured vast resources into ‘s-Hertogenbosch, building the most extensive and sophisticated fortifications science could devise. . . . [The city was] the hinge of the line of Spanish strongholds . . . ringing the United Provinces until 1629. With its loss, there was a gaping hole in the middle” (507–8). In February 1628, the Spanish garrisons at Wesel and ‘s-Hertogenbosch were the third and fourth largest (after Breda and Antwerp) of the fifteen fortified places that encircled the United Provinces. See Israel’s Table 26, p. 498. 114.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 244. Simonds had received the news of the capture of Wesel in a letter by Sir Muys van Holy, Joachimi’s son-in-law, dated August 25. Ibid., MS 376, fo. 115. 115.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 247. 116.  Ibid., fo. 248. 117.  Autobiography, fos. 124r–25r (1:421–23). 118.  Ibid., fos. 125v–26r (1:424–27). 119.  BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 93r. 120.  Ibid., MS 374, fo. 72 (March 9, 1630—wrongly listed in the Harley catalog as 1629).

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Notes to Chapter 3 121.  See ibid., MS 383, fo. 98 (D’Ewes to Stuteville, June 1, 1630) and MS 376, fo. 122 (Muys de Holy to D’Ewes, July 13, 1630). 122.  Ibid., fo. 100. 123.  Ibid., fo. 102. 124.  Ibid., fo. 104. 125.  Ibid., fo. 119. 126.  Ibid., fo. 105. 127.  Ibid., fo. 107. The only bright spot D’Ewes could find was Louis XIII’s recovery from an illness so severe that he had received extreme unction. Had he died, his brother (“of a moore bloudie nature & vicious life”) would have succeeded him; D’Ewes’s source for some of this information was a French Protestant forced into penurious exile whom D’Ewes had taken on as a servant. 128.  Ibid., fo. 109. 129. Autobiography, fos. 129v–30r (2:1–3). On the reputation of Gustavus Adolphus in England, see Timothy K. Hagen, “Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and the English Press: News, Foreign Policy and Popular Opinion in Early Stuart England,” unpublished dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2002. 130.  BL Harl. MS. 383, fos. 56r, 55v. 131.  Ibid., MS. 374, fo. 89. There is another version of this undated letter in MS 383, fos. 113v, 114r, that differs in some ways. D’Ewes’s response (fos. 115v–16r) is dated January 26, 1630/31. The exchange shows both Stuteville and D’Ewes very knowledgeable about disputes on predestination (beginning with William Barrett’s famous sermon and mentioning writings by Samuel Harsnet, William Perkins, Samuel Ward, Richard Montague, Sleidan, and others). So far as I know, the only scholar to have noticed this clash between D’Ewes and Stuteville is Anthony Milton. See his essay on John Dury in Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor, eds., Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 101. See also his Catholic and Reformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 441. 132.  BL Harl. MS. 383, fo. 113r. D’Ewes added that he found it “moore strange . . . yow should recorde it under your hand the error of consubstanciacion is moore odious then that of Transubstanciation, when yet yow know the later hath filled Gods church with idolatrie & deprived the people of the cupp, which the former did not.” 133.  Ibid., fo. 115v. 134.  Ibid., fo. 115r. That admission did not prevent D’Ewes, ever tenacious, from correcting several further errors that he thought his friend had made. 135. Autobiography, fos. 129v, 142r (2:1–2, 46–47). He also praised Sir Thomas Roe for convincing Gustavus to ally with France. 136.  BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 105 (from Islington on October 6, 1630). 137.  Autobiography, fos. 107r–8r (1:360–63). 138. Watson, 21. Other volumes from Savile’s library went to Cotton, Archbishop Ussher, Sir William Howard, and James I. 139.  Autobiography, fo. 115v (1:391–92). 140.  Ibid., fo. 118r (1:400). The wording here is not entirely clear, but the sense of the passage is that the letters he exchanged for others he wanted came from Starkey’s collection. It is possible that he made the exchange for papers in Cotton’s collection. 141.  BL Harl. MS 339, fo. 104v. 142. Watson, 24–28. Watson’s introduction contains excellent discussions of the booksellers D’Ewes worked with, the timing and prices of his purchases, the sources of his medieval charters and rolls, his methods of arranging his collection, and much else.

Notes to Chapter 3 143. Ibid., 40. Compare Richard Ovenden, “The Libraries of the Antiquaries (ca. 1580–1640) and the Idea of a National Collection,” in Elizabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber, eds., The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1:527–61. Ovenden provides an informative overview of the book and manuscript collecting activities of Cotton, Dering, D’Ewes, and others in this period. 144.  BL Harl. MS 593, fo. 14r. 145. Ibid. 146. Lambarde, A Perambulation of Kent (1596), 61, 293. 147.  BL Harl. MS 593, fo. 14v. 148.  Ibid., fo. 15r. 149.  Ibid. “Pryduide” is a term based on the Welsh word for poet. He learned of this bard from David Powell’s History of Wales (1625). On the verso, he noted that Geoffrey’s contemporary Giraldus Cambrensis rejected “the vaine additions and impossibilities” in Geoffrey’s book but accepted “the landing of Brute & his Troians & the denomination alsoe of this land & people from him.” This is followed by another paragraph that cites from Sir John Price’s Historiae Brytannicae defensio (1573) additional evidence for “the storie of Brutes landing.” He also praised Price as “that vnmatched Antiquarie soe often alreadie vouched, to whose unpatternd paines I am soe much beholding.” 150.  Ibid., fo. 16v. 151.  Ibid., fo. 17r. 152.  Ibid., fos. 17v–18r. He further darkened the picture of the pre-Roman era on fo. 19r: “Concerning the times of the first Brittaines . . . these elder daies weere guiltie of nothing but barbarisme lust & crueltie; dwelling in woods, cloathed with painting, coupled in bestial polygamie, mangled with cuttings, feeding on wilde beasts & roots, darts cheifelie ther weapons, exorcismes ther religion slauerie ther obedience & oligarchicall tyrannie ther goverment.” 153.  Autobiography, fo. 110v (1:373–74). 154.  Ibid., fo. 111v–12r (1:376–80). 155.  Ibid., fo. 115v (1:391). 156.  Ibid., fo. 118r ((1:400). 157.  Simonds D’Ewes, The Journals of all the Parliaments during the reign of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1682), sig. A3r. 158.  Autobiography, fo. 120v (1:409–10). 159. D’Ewes, The Journals of all the Parliaments, sig. A2v. His preoccupation with Elizabethan Spanish policy led him to downplay various other matters that were proposed and debated. The disappearance of the clerk’s books for the period from 1584 to 1601 after Simonds used them has understandably disappointed historians of Elizabethan parliaments. On the merits and demerits of D’Ewes’s edition, see David M. Dean, “Sir Symonds D’Ewes’s Bills of ‘No Great Moment,’” Parliamentary History 3 (1984): 157–78, and his Law-making and Society in Late Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. 3, 6, 105, 126n, 128n. 132, 179n., 228n. 160. D’Ewes, The Journals of all the Parliaments, sig. A3r. 161.  Ibid., sig. A3v. 162.  Autobiography, fo. 121v (1:412–13). 163.  Ibid., fo. 122r & v (1:415). 164.  Ibid., fo. 127r & v (1:430–32). 165.  Ibid., fo. 128r (1:433). 166.  Ibid., fo. 128v (1:435). This was probably the one by Richard Knolles, first published in 1603 and reissued several times (including 1631). 167.  Ibid., fo. 129r (1:437–38). This is now BL Harl. 657. The first folio has

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Notes to Chapter 3 “an elaborate illuminated title-page on vellum” that D’Ewes created, and “the remainder is in the hand of an amanuensis.” Watson, 112. 168.  Ibid., fo. 129r & v (1:438–39). 169.  Ibid., fo. 104v (1:351–52). 170.  Ibid., fo. 106r (1:357). 171.  Ibid., fo. 106r & v (1:357–58). 172.  Ibid., fo. 106v (1:358). 173.  Ibid., fo. 122r (1:417). 174.  Ibid., fo. 106v (1:359). Halliwell recorded that he thought he had seen “marks answering the description in the text” on “the leads of King’s College Chapel.” This is possible, but roof repairs would have occurred many times since 1627. There were major overhauls in 1861–63 and the 1950s. I am grateful to Dr. Louis Caron for information on this point. 175.  Ibid., fos. 107v–8r (1:362–63). After 1628, references to fasting turn up repeatedly in the autobiography. See, for example, 1:428–29, 435; 2:69, 88, 91, 99, 141. 176.  Ibid., fo. 110r (1:370–71). 177.  Ibid., fo. 110v (1:373). 178.  Ibid., fo. 112r (1:379–80). 179.  Ibid., fos. 115v–16r (1:392–93). 180.  Ibid., fo. 118v (1:401). 181.  Ibid., fo. 118v (1:401–2). 182.  Ibid., fo. 121r (1:410–11). 183.  BL Harl. MS 384, fo. 67r. 184.  Autobiography, fo. 122r (1:414). 185.  Ibid., fos. 122v–23r (1:416–18). 186.  Ibid., fos. 122r–24r (1:418–20). 187.  Ibid., fo. 126r (1:427–28); BL Harl. MS 384, fo. 29. 188.  Autobiography, fo. 126v (1:428–30). Compare pp. 118–19 above on the legality of fasting. 189.  Ibid., fo. 127r (1:430). The first edition of Preston’s The New Covenant was published in 1629 and was the book Paul read in Islington. For the exchange with Cartwright, see ch. 3, pp. 98–99. 190.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 33. 191.  Autobiography., fo. 127r (1:431). 192.  Ibid., fos. 127v–28v (1:433–35). 193.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 37. Simonds’s relations with Coventry later soured when the latter refused for five years to confirm a judge’s decision in Simonds’s favor. He reported this to Joachimi early in 1640 just after Coventry died with the comment that the late lord keeper “has now rendered the account of his crimes to the supreme Judge.” Ibid., MS 377, fo. 298. 194.  Autobiography, fo. 128v (1:435–36). 195.  Ibid., fo. 129r & v (1:438–39). 196.  BL Harl. MS 374, fo. 75. 197.  Autobiography, fos. 130v–31v (2:5–7). 198.  Ibid., fos. 131v–32v (2:7–11). At some point during Paul’s final hours, Anne arrived “to performe the last office of a deseruing daughter in law,” but she was so “much affrighted with his dolefull and deepe-fetched groanes” that she had to leave the room. Ibid., fo. 136r (2:22). 199.  Ibid., fo. 80r & v (1:274–75). 200. Venn, 2:7. Venn reported that he was rector of Stowlangtoft from 1625 to 1631 (and then of Feltwell, Norfolk, 1630—ejected but reinstated 1660). But it

Notes to Chapter 4    463 is clear from Simonds’s autobiography that Damport was still at Stowlangtoft in 1634 (2:104), and in BL Harl. MS, fo. 19, he spoke of ten years during which Damport vexed him after Paul’s death in 1631. 201.  Autobiography, fo. 80v (1:275). 202.  Ibid., fo. 82r (1:279–80). 203.  Ibid., fo. 137r & v (2:26–27). 204.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 30r. 205.  Ibid., fo. 32v. 206.  Autobiography, fo. 137v (2:27). 207.  Ibid., fo. 138v (2:31). 208.  Ibid., fos. 136r–37r (2:22–25). 209.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 32r & v (oddly, the draft of this March 25, 1631, letter begins on the verso and ends on the recto side). 210.  Ibid., fo. 39. 211.  Autobiography, fo. 132r & v (2:10–11). 212.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 39. 213.  Ibid., fo. 63. 214.  Autobiography, fo. 136r (2:23).

Chapter 4: “My dearest dearest”—1631–1639 1.  Autobiography, fo. 142v (2:44); fo. 106r (1:357); fo. 137r (2:26); fo. 138v (2:30). 2.  BL Harl. MS 7659, fos. 7v, 8r & v. He also received what he called “Casual & Contingent” sums such as £136 for the sale of timber. In addition, he owned several properties in London that were rented, including what may have been an inn. Samuel Man paid him £10 11s 8d twice a year for the “Sign of the Swan” in St. Paul’s Churchyard. 3.  Ibid., MS 379, fo. 63. The letter is undated, but Simonds was away from Stow Hall from March 18 until April 20; Anne probably received this letter at Stowlangtoft at some point during that interval. 4.  Autobiography, fos. 138v–39r (2:31). Stowlangtoft is six and a half miles northwest of Bury. 5.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 41. Ambrose Copinger, a Cambridge graduate, was rector of Lavenham from 1622 to 1644, having succeeded his father, Henry, in the benefice. Ambrose wrote to Simonds on April 5 to express his gratitude for Paul D’Ewes’s patronage and to promise his loyalty to the new owner of the manor. He said that he had heard from Simonds’s man Pinchbeck that a “Commemoration Sermon” on a Tuesday after Easter was desired and that he would be happy to preach it. In a postscript, doubtless remembering Simonds’s battle with Damport, Copinger added that if Simonds wanted any other clergyman to preach the sermon he would “willingly condescend vnto it.” Ibid., MS 385, fo. 149. 6.  Autobiography, fo. 142v (2:44). 7.  Ibid., fo. 143r (2:46). 8.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 253. 9.  Autobiography, fo. 143r (2:45–46). 10.  Ibid., fos. 142v–43r (2:45–46). A child of Jone Ellyott, Simonds’s elder sister, died in November 1632, and her letter to Anne is one of several from Simonds’s sisters showing their experience of the same kind of loss. Jone wrote to Anne: “deare sister it hath pleased god againe, to make me drincke of that bitter cup, whereof I haue so often tasted, that it makes me vnfit either to speake or wright, sorow and greefe hauing power to disabell the strongest: yet I cannot forget, to aknowledg I am so far obliged to you, as I shall alwai[es] acounte my selfe happy, to write vpon your command.” BL Harl. MS 382, fo. 9.

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Notes to Chapter 4 11.  Autobiography, fo. 143r (2:46). 12.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 285. 13.  Autobiography, fo. 143v (2:47). 14.  BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 104. 15.  Ibid., fos. 143v–44v (2:47–52 ). Simonds’s journal of the Parliament of 1624 begins with a printed list of the members, and where it has “Laurence Hyde Knight,” D’Ewes crossed out the word “Knight” and substituted “Esquire.” BL Harl. MS 159, fo. 7r. 16.  BL Harl. MS. 377, fo. 255. Simonds added that many thought that Hyde was in danger of dismissal by the king because he unjustly condemned and executed a man and that this anxiety contributed to his sudden death. After Hyde’s death, a justice of the Court of Common Pleas voided Simonds’s fine without having been asked to do so. Autobiography, fo. 144r & v (2:50). 17.  Autobiography, fo. 145r & v (2:52–55). 18.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 255. 19.  Ibid., MS 375, fo. 49. Casaubon’s second wife gave birth to seventeen children, so there was no shortage of Casaubons who needed to make their way in the world. ODNB, s.v. Casaubon, Isaac. 20.  Autobiography, fo. 151v (2:76–77). 21.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 145. 22.  Ibid., MS 386, fo. 62. For a series of letters from Cogan at Coxden, see ibid., MS 385, fos. 124–40. 23.  Autobiography, fos. 149v–50r (2:69–71). Knowles opposed the advancement of Laudians while at St. Catharine’s, but his anticeremonialism gave Laud the opportunity to force him to resign his fellowship in 1637. He went to New England in 1639 and became copastor at Watertown. ODNB, s.v. “Knowles, John.” 24.  Autobiography, fo. 152r (2:78). 25.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 139. Richard spelled Zeuxis as “Zetius” and mixed up the stories. Appeles was famous for his picture of Venus rising from the sea and Zeuxis for his realistic grapes. 26.  Ibid., fo. 141. This letter is undated but must have been written soon after Richard because the latter’s response to it is dated May 29. 27.  Ibid., fo. 143. For example, a letter Richard sent to Simonds on June 18 says nothing about it. 28.  Ibid., fo. 145. 29.  Autobiography, fo. 157v (2:95–97). For Lady Denton’s contribution, see ibid., fo. 158r (2:98). 30. Sharpe, 414–15. He also consulted a former justice of King’s Bench and his wife’s kinsman Viscount Wimbledon. Wimbledon replied that “if a man is come to London with his wife so he do not breake vp house in the Contry it is not offenciue to the Kinges Proclamation.” BL Harl. MS 287, fo. 285. Thomas Knyvett, a Norfolk gentlemen Simonds knew, wrote from London to his wife on November 13, 1632, to report Palmer’s fine, saying that it was a “business much pried into.” Bertram Schofield, ed., The Knyvett Letters (London: Constable and Co., 1949), 78. 31.  Autobiography, fo. 152v (2:79). On the Star Chamber episode, see Salt, 267. 32.  Ibid., fo. 153v (2:82). 33.  Ibid., fo. 155r (2:88–89). 34.  Ibid., fo. 155r (2:89–90). 35.  Ibid., fo. 155v (2:91). 36.  Ibid., fo. 158r & v (2:98–99). 37.  BL Harl. MS 378, fo. 35. 38.  Autobiography, fo. 158v (2:99). His account book recorded a donation of £30 for the poor of Stowlangtoft at Christmas in 1635. BL Harl. MS 7659, fo. 19r.

Notes to Chapter 4 39. Autobiography, 159v (2:102–3). He wrote that he had taken notes on the infamous sermon and had them still in 1638, but I have been unable to find them. 40.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 19. 41. Tyacke, 70, 74. 42.  Autobiography, fo. 161r (2:107–8). Halliwell silently excised the final phrase about the milk. 43.  Ibid., fo. 165v (2:123). 44.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 262. 45.  Ibid., fo. 263. 46.  Ibid., fo. 264. 47.  Ibid., MS 382, fo. 45. 48.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 265. 49.  Ibid., fo. 264. 50.  Autobiography, fo. 166v (2:126). 51.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 52. 52.  Autobiography, fos. 166v–67r (2:126–27). Boxted Hall is still owned by the Poley-Weller family. Simonds was there from November 26 to 30, examining Poley’s deeds, coats-of-arms, and other documents relating to the history of his family. 53.  Ibid., fos. 172r & v (2:144–45). 54.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 273. 55.  Autobiography, fo. 172v (2:145). 56.  Ibid., fo. 173r (2:146–47). 57.  Ibid., fo. 146v (2:126). Anne’s birth was noted on fo. 127r (1:431) and her name first mentioned on fo. 148v (2:67). 58.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 277. 59.  Ibid., fo. 278 (January 15/25, 1638). 60.  Ibid., MS 379, fo. 58. 61.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 292 (September 2/12, 1639). 62.  Ibid., fo. 196 (September 24, 1639). 63.  Ibid., MS 379, fos. 300, 302. For Hanna Brograve’s letter of condolence, see ibid., MS 384, fo. 85r. I am grateful to Diane Willen for this reference. 64. Ibid., 379, fo. 112v. 65.  Ibid., MS 386, fo. 182. Nurse Page was still at work for D’Ewes in February 1643 when, according to one of his account books, he paid “her halfe yeare wages & bill: £8 17s 8d.” Ibid., MS 7659, fo. 19r. 66.  Ibid., MS 379, fo. 149. 67.  Autobiography, fo. 161r (2:108). 68.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 147. 69.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 265. I have not found Richard’s September 2 letter and so must rely on Simonds’s remarks about it to Joachimi. 70.  Ibid., MS 382, fo. 84. 71.  Ibid., MS 379, fo. 48. 72.  Ibid., fo. 49. I take this to mean that with Betty’s departure there would be more space at Stow Hall. 73.  Ibid., MS 382, fo. 45. The letter is not dated, but it is mainly concerned with little Clopton’s convulsions (quoted above) and so was probably written during 1635 or early 1636. This Surrey man may have been Poley’s rival. 74.  Ibid., MS 379, fo. 51. 75.  Ibid., fo. 53. Some of the letters he referred to here are missing from the record, so the nature of the quarrel must remain somewhat murky. 76.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 268 (January 4, 1636). Richelieu had bought the chateau in 1633 and improved it lavishly thereafter, with special attention to the gardens.

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Notes to Chapter 4 See R. J. Knecht, Richelieu (Harlow, Essex: Addison Wesley Longman, 1991), 196– 97. 77.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 156. 78.  Ibid., fo. 153. 79.  Ibid., MS 374, fo. 97. 80.  Ibid., MS 383, fo. 135. 81.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 210. 82.  ODNB, s.v. “Goring, George.” 83.  BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 133. Richard dated this letter May 15, 1636, but Simonds corrected it to 1637. In his next letter (dated May 26, 1637) to Simonds, Richard related that “Mr Stone tells me he is bound for Holland som time the next weeke.” 84.  Ibid., MS 374, fo. 103. 85.  Ibid., MS 379, fo. 158. 86.  Ibid., MS 382, fo. 143. 87.  Ibid., MS 379, fo. 161. 88.  Ibid., fo. 56. 89.  Ibid., fo. 155. 90.  Ibid., fo. 163. The letter was dated January 7/17. 91.  Ibid., fo. 179. 92.  Ibid., MS 374, fo. 117. See John Stoye, English Travellers Abroad, 1604–1667 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952), esp. 393–445, for Englishmen in France after 1630 (including Richard D’Ewes). 93.  BL Harl. MS 374, fo. 119. 94.  Ibid., fo. 116. De Thou’s library was indeed extraordinary. There were “6,600 references in the catalogue established upon his demise, one of the beststocked in Paris during the reign of Louis XIII.” It ended up in Louis XIV’s library. Daniel Woolf, ed., The Oxford History of Historical Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3:385–87. A “press” was a large cupboard, usually with shelves for storage of books or other items. 95.  BL Harl. MS 374, fo. 289. 96.  Ibid., MS 383, fo. 148. 97.  Ibid., fo. 140v. 98.  Ibid., fo. 151. In this letter, he referred to Bishop Wren’s translation from Norwich to Ely, which had occurred on March 20. Of it, he wrote that he was not certain “whether I am gladd or greeud for D. Wrens Remoue.” Since it is likely that he did know about Simonds’s hatred for Wren, this could indicate that his own religious outlook was sympathetic to Wren. It could also be read as pleasure that Wren would not be presiding over Suffolk and regret that his new diocese would include Cambridge. Quite unlike his brother, evidence about Richard’s religious views is scanty. 99.  Ibid., fo. 152r & v. 100.  Ibid., MS 379, fo. 58. 101.  Ibid., fo. 165. 102.  Ibid., fo. 160. 103.  Ibid., MS 383, fo. 158. “Brauely” here means grandly or sumptuously. 104.  Ibid., MS 379, fo. 181. 105.  Ibid., fo. 168. 106.  Ibid., fo. 169. 107.  Ibid., fo. 171r & v. He again included a separate note (fo. 170) to Anne apologizing for the infrequency of his letters to her and expressing his love. On Milton’s visit to Geneva, see W. R. Parker, Milton: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon

Notes to Chapter 4 Press, 1996), 1:181. Milton signed the “autograph book” that belonged to Camilio Cordoini, “a member of a Protestant Neapolitan family settled in Geneva” on June 10. Gordon Campbell and Tomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work & Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 126. 108.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 184. He dated this letter from Lyons on July 15/25, 1640, but this must have been a slip for 1639. As will be demonstrated below, his progress toward London was via Orleans, Paris, and Flanders, and he says in this letter that he had sent his previous one from Geneva. He was probably in England by March 1640 and definitely in London by August 4, 1640. See ibid., fos. 183, 185. 109.  Ibid., fo. 172. 110.  Ibid., fo. 174. 111.  Ibid., fo. 175. 112.  Ibid., fo. 173 (October 16/26, 1639). In this letter Richard also urged Simonds not to rely so much on gossip from certain “women” who sought to “ingraciate them selues, flatter yow, and abuse such as many times trewly loue yow” during the feuding with Damport. 113.  Ibid., fo. 59. The date of this letter is hidden in the binding of the volume, but Richard’s next letter, written from Paris on November 24, supplies its date. Ibid., fo. 176. 114. Ibid. 115.  Ibid., fo. 176. 116.  Ibid., fo. 60. 117.  Ibid., fo. 178. 118.  Ibid., fo. 180. 119.  Ibid., fo. 61. A note on this draft in Simonds’s hand says that this letter was not sent but “it well serues to keepe it amongst my brothers.” This provides further evidence that the organization of the letters (at least in some if not all of the volumes of his papers) was of his choosing. 120.  Autobiography, fo. 155r & v (2:90). 121.  Ibid., fo. 142v (2:43). 122.  Ibid., fo. 160v (2:106–7). 123.  Autobiography, fos. 139r–40v (2:33–37). In the paragraph following his speech, Simonds added that the different treatment of the upland tenants had begun about a century earlier in the Lavenham court rolls. He did not know whether this had happened “by the negligence or dishonestie of some steward,” but as it happened the first tenant to be affected by his new principle was the rector, Ambrose Copinger. Simonds admitted Copinger to an upland tenancy and “absolutelie bestowed it vpon him, without retaineing one penie of it.” His later constitutional objection to ship money relied in part upon the same objection to uncertain and variable payments “at the will of the Lorde.” 124.  Ibid., fos. 140v–41r (2:38–39). 125.  Ibid., fo. 141r & v (2:39–41). Whether Simonds’s suspicion of James was justifiable can be doubted, since there is other evidence of his loyalty to Cotton. I am grateful to Daniel Woolf for advice on this point. Simonds also said that Cotton thought that bishops Neile and Laud were behind the attack on him. 126.  Ibid., fos. 141v–42r (2:41–42). S. R. Gardiner had his doubts about whether Flood was Cotton’s bastard. He stated that D’Ewes “is not always to be trusted when he brings personal charges.” History, 7:139. This could have been an instance in which Simonds’s ever-present desire to see divine providence at work in ingenious ways made him too credulous. 127.  Kevin Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton, 1586–1631 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 143–46. For another examination of this episode that argues that

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Notes to Chapter 4 Sharpe underestimated its importance, see Noah Millstone, “Evil Counsel: The Propositions to Bridle the Impertinency of Parliament and the Critique of Caroline Government in the Late 1620s,” JBS 50 (October 2011): 813–39. According to Millstone, “the deliberate circulation of the Propositions by a disaffected political group shows that criticism was no mere academic exercise but was instead part of a complex public strategy to delegitimate the Caroline regime” (816). See also John Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 158–64. Cotton “had a reputation for infidelity and was threatened with blackmail as late as August 1630.” ODNB, s.v. “Cotton, Robert.” Simonds’s statements about the antiquary’s sexual behavior would not have surprised contemporaries. 128.  Autobiography, fo. 142r (2:43). 129.  Ibid., fo. 142v (2:44). 130. Ibid., 2:150–52. Minor changes occurred in the final version of the will (1645) that included “alterations to allow for his remarriage and the death and birth of children.” Watson, 89, n. 258. He spoke in the House of Commons on May 16, 1642, at a moment when it had been reported that Royalists in Yorkshire had jeered that the MPs in London should “set their houses in order because they should shortly lose their heads.” He then said that on January 4 he had “left my will with a third person in trust” and “taken the greatest care for that which cost me the most pains (meaning my library).” See PJLP-2:324. 131. Autobiography, 2:150–52. The Latin adjective fucosus means “painted, coloured; spurious, phoney.” 132.  Ibid., fos. 137v–38r (2:27–29). He had attempted to purchase the original, but he thought that the second husband of Peter D’Ewes’s widow was asking an unreasonable price for it, having seen how keen Simonds was to have it. Neither this likeness nor the one of his father is extant. St. Michael Bassishaw succumbed to the Great Fire of 1666, taking with it a memorial Simonds had placed there to Adrian D’Ewes and Alice Ravenscroft. 133.  Autobiography, fo. 130v (2:4). 134.  Ibid., fo. 130v (2:4–5). 135.  Ibid., fo. 145v (2:56–57). 136.  Ibid., fo. 148v (2:65–67). 137.  Ibid., fo. 149r (2:67–69). 138.  Ibid., fo. 150r & v (2:71–73). In November, 1632, he obtained “ten rare British coines in siluer” that had been found when a cellar was being dug in the earl of Bedford’s new Covent Garden project. Fo. 152v (2:80). 139.  Ibid., fos. 150v–51v (2:73–76). Warren Hollister noted that during Henry I’s reign Aubrey de Vere and Richard Basset were “joint sheriffs of no fewer than eleven shires” and “itinerant justices” in these shires, but he said nothing about a chief justiceship for Basset. C. Warren Hollister, Henry I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 360. 140.  Autobiography, fo. 152r (2:78). 141.  Ibid., fos. 152v–53r (2:80–81). 142.  Ibid., fo. 154v (2:87–88). 143.  Ibid., fo. 155v (2:90–91). 144.  Ibid., fos. 155v–56r (2:91–92). His library contained six rather than five volumes, the first three published at Geneva and vols. 4 and 5 at Frankfurt (Watson, 93). De Thou’s Mémoires were included in some later editions (including the English translation by Bernard Wilson published in 1729 in two volumes). Watson notes that D’Ewes’s Autobiography mentions the “purchase of all volumes in London in 1633.” Since D’Ewes and many other gentlemen in this period often

Notes to Chapter 4 bought unbound material and had their binders create the volumes for their libraries with the appropriate family crests, it seems possible that the sixth volume (not mentioned by D’Ewes) contained the Mémoires as a separate item. 145.  Autobiography, fos. 156v–57r (2:93–95). “Braue” here meant elaborate. 146.  Ibid., fos. 157v–58v (2:97–100). 147.  Ibid., fo. 159r (2:101). The word “cyrograph” is not in the OED, and Halliwell omitted this word and the central part of this description of how D’Ewes organized the deeds. This was probably D’Ewes’s spelling of the word “chirograph.” which was a method of authenticating documents thought to have originated in Anglo-Saxon England. The OED defines it as “an obligation or bond given in one’s own handwriting” and as “any formal written document.” 148.  Ibid., fo. 160r (2:105–6). At the end of the month, he visited Thelnetham church in Suffolk, where he found evidence of knightly members of the Bokenham family in the fourteenth century. His brother-in-law Wiseman Bokenham was heir to the manor of Thelnetham, which lies north of Stowlangtoft near the border with Norfolk. 149.  BL Add. MS 25,384, fo. 27r. In a September 1639 letter to Ussher, Simonds said that “our dear Spelman has caused great offence to all pious people by his dedication and recently published preface before the recently published Concilia.” BL Harl. MS 378, fos. 46–47. 150.  Autobiography, fo. 161v (2:110). 151.  Ibid., fo. 166v (2:125–26). On the Poley records, see fos. 166v–67r (2:127– 28). 152.  BL Stowe MS 184, fo. 8. 153.  BL Harl. MS 374, fo. 92. 154.  Ibid. fo. 92v. On Joscelyn, L’Isle, and other pioneers of the study of AngloSaxon, see Kees Dekker, “Reading the Anglo-Saxon Gospels in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Thomas N. Hall and Donald Scragg, eds., Anglo-Saxon Books and Their Readers (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009), 68–93. 155.  BL Harl. MS 377, fos. 27r–28v. 156.  Ibid., fos. 28v–29r (August 28/September 7, 1639). Duchesne’s reply finally arrived in December 1639. See ibid., MS 376, fo. 38. 157.  Ibid., fo. 290. 158.  Ibid., MS 382, fo. 217. 159.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 289. 160.  Ibid., MS 7523, fo. 310r (January 31, 1639). I am grateful to Robert Ingram for bringing these letters from D’Ewes to Downes to my attention. 161.  Ibid., MS 385, fo. 197 (March 4, 1639). 162.  Ibid., fo. 208. This followed a March 18 letter from Downes in which he related that he had told both Damports after a Sunday service that the D’Ewes’s were delighted to have such good neighbors as the Damports. Downes also reported in a detailed fashion on the contents of “3 very good sermones to stre[n] gthen vs against the divelles temptation” that Damport had delivered. Ibid., fo. 203r & v. It is clear from remarks in Simonds’s and Richard’s letters in 1639 that Damport was newly married early in 1639, so the wife (or wives) who had borne his nine children must have died and the spouse Anne liked was his new one. See ibid., MS 384, fo. 44 (Simonds to Damport, May 30, 1639); ibid., MS 379, fos. 176 (Richard to Simonds, November 14/24, 1639) and 49 (Simonds to Richard, October 19/29, 1639). 163.  Ibid., MS 7523, fo. 209r. The attempt to reduce the friction between Onge and Damport appears not to have succeeded. On November 22, 1639, Edmund

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Notes to Chapter 4 Calamy wrote to Simonds to say he was “very sory to hear of the difference between Mr Danford & my Brother Onge. Oh that you could be a peacemaker.” Ibid., MS 385, fo. 107. 164.  Ibid., MS 7523, fo. 312r. He also wanted the constables to choose townsmen rather than farmers. 165.  Ibid., fo. 209r. 166.  Ibid., fo. 313r. The moths were not a new problem. On April 12, 1637, Simonds had told Downes to “looke carefullie to kill the moths in the dining roome.” Ibid., fo. 308v. 167.  Ibid., fo. 314r. 168.  Ibid., fo. 307r. 169.  Ibid., MS 377, fos. 195–96. 170.  Ibid., MS 378, fos. 46–47.

Chapter 5: “The highest stepp of wickednes”—1631–1639 1.  BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 124. 2.  Ibid., MS 382, fo. 224. In this letter, he also reported that Lord Brooke and Lord Saye were “comitted at yorke. I would they had neuer come there at all.” 3.  Ibid., MS 383, fo. 121. See fo. 123 for another newsletter from Watts. 4.  Ibid., fos. 128–31. The quotation is on fo. 128r. 5.  Ibid., fos. 138–40. 6.  Ibid., fo. 140. 7.  Ibid., fo. 137. 8.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 280. 9.  Ibid., MS 375, fo. 39 (August 6/16, 1631). 10.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 254 (August 20/30, 1631). It was in the 1630s that D’Ewes’s college, St. John’s, “emerged as second to none in the lavishness of its new chapel furnishings.” Behind these changes was the new master of the college, William Beale, and he was “chiefly responsible, as Vice-Chancellor, for the publication at Cambridge in 1635 of Robert Shelford’s Arminian discourses.” Tyacke, 194. 11.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 255 (September 19/29, 1631). 12.  Autobiography, fos. 146r, 148v (2:57, 65–66). 13.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 256 (January 5/15, 1631/32). 14.  Ibid., fo. 257. 15.  Ibid., MS 374, fo. 80. The letter is dated January 13, 1633. That he did indeed write it in 1633 rather than 1634 is suggested by a reference to Simonds’s “move to the country.” 16.  Autobiography, fo. 154r & v (2:84–86). 17.  Ibid., fos. 159v–60r (2:104–5). 18.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 261. Noy’s physicians included Sir Theodore Mayerne, Joachimi’s son-in-law. 19.  Ibid., fo. 258. 20.  Autobiography, fos. 161v–62v (2:110–12). 21.  BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 104. 22.  Ibid., MS 386, fo. 34. 23.  Autobiography, fo. 166r (2:124). A young Puritan divine then at Cambridge also recorded his detestation of Novell’s claims about justification and baptism. See Tom Webster and Kenneth Shipps, eds., The Diary of Samuel Rogers, 1634–1638 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Church of England Record Society, 2004), 21. 24.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 259. D’Ewes here also mentioned his hope that John Dury’s efforts would “put to rest” the dispute between the followers of Calvin and Luther.

Notes to Chapter 5 25.  Ibid., fo. 260 (January 20/30, 1634/35). 26.  Ibid., fo. 261. 27.  Ibid., fo. 262. 28.  Ibid., fo. 263 (June 29/July 9, 1635). 29.  Ibid., fo. 264. 30. Sharpe, PR, 596–97. 31.  Ibid., fo. 264 (letter dated September 18/28). Tirlemont is the French name of the town, known in Dutch as Tienen or Thienen. According to Simonds’s unidentified source, the guilt lay upon French forces under Marshal Châtillon, but in fact the assault was by allied Dutch and French units under the overall command of the prince of Orange. According to Randall Lesaffer, the sack of Tienen continued for two horrific days and included plunder, rape, and desecration of churches. Lesaffer, “Siege Warfare and the Early Modern Laws of War,” in R. C. H. Broers et. al., eds., Ius Brabanticum, Ius Commune, Ius Gentium (Nijmegen: Wolf Legal, 2006), 87–88. On the subject of the news of atrocities and alleged atrocities on the English public in this period, see Barbara Donagan, War in England, 1642–1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 25–32. 32.  Autobiography, fo. 167v (2:129). 33.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 275. 34.  Autobiography, fo. 170r & v (2:137–38). On Stone, see Nadine Akkerman, ed., The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, vol. 2, 1632–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 947, 606. On March 9, 1642, the House of Commons gave orders that Sir Robert Stone would “transport over into the Low Countries 12 hunting horses for the Queen of Bohemia.” PJLP-2:19. 35.  Autobiography, fos. 170r–71v (2:137–40). 36.  For the letter to Joachimi, see BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 271. 37.  BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 133. Stone also told Richard that his wife would be returning to The Hague soon and himself a bit later and either would be happy to take a letter from Simonds back to Queen Elizabeth. 38.  Ibid., MS 6988, fo. 105. For Henry Frederick’s letter, see MS 6988, fo. 81. 39.  Ibid., MS 286, fo. 308. Simonds’s letters to her appear to have continued until late in 1638. See ibid., MS 377, fo. 286, for his remark in a letter to Joachimi dated November 13/23 about rumors of further military setbacks to the young elector that he claimed to have “foretold . . . in my last letter humbly sent” to the queen. 40.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 134r. On December 31, 1636/January 9, 1637, he had written to Joachimi, then back in his homeland, to state his displeasure with Charles I’s tough stance in the dispute about fishing rights with the Dutch. But he also described the continuing anger in England that the Dutch government had not punished the perpetrators of the deed and paid recompense of at least £500,000 to the English merchants for their losses. Ibid., fo. 276. He also mentioned the Amboyna matter in other letters to Joachimi. See fos. 248 (November, 1629), 283 (August 13/23, 1638), and 296 (October 31 /November 9, 1639). 41.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 134r. 42.  Ibid. On Laurence, see Tyacke, 83–84. 43.  ODNB, s.v. “Laurence, Thomas.” 44.  Thomas Laurence, A Sermon preached before the Kings Maiestie at Whitehall . . . , 2d ed. (London, 1637), 7, 17–18, 20. On p. 16 Laurence referred to Richard Montague, a man near the top of the short list of clergymen hated by Puritans, as a “learned Prelate of this land.” On p. 11 he described those who “aimed at a Parity of Church-men” and sought “a parity of all places with[in] the Church” as “rebels” who were guilty of “a distemper of zeale.” For D’Ewes’s view of Montague, see pp. 339, 460 (n. 13).

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Notes to Chapter 5 45.  ODNB, s.v. “Lewis, Charles.” 46.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 135r. 47. Ibid. 48.  Ibid., fo. 134r. 49. Ibid. 50.  Ibid., fo. 135r. 51.  Ibid., MS 383, fos. 149–50. 52.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 280. 53.  Autobiography, fo. 167v (2:129–30). 54. Salt, 262. 55.  BL Harl. MS 387, fo. 75. That Edwards was a fellow Puritan is evident from his complaint that there had been “many ministers very Good and Godlie euen lately suspended in our diocess by the Archbishops Comissioners. But the Lord ruleth in Sion & vnto the ends of th’earth.” 56.  Ibid., fo. 78. 57.  See p. 128. 58.  Primitive Practise, 34. 59.  BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 151. 60.  Ibid., MS 379, fo. 58. 61.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 283. 62.  Ibid., fo. 284. Dated September 24/October 4, 1638. 63.  Ibid., MS 374, fo. 121. 64.  Ibid., MS 382, fo. 223. 65.  Ibid., MS 376, fo. 42. Commyn was the vicar of Albury from 1637 until he was ejected in 1662. Venn 1:377. 66.  BL Harl. MS 378, fo. 42. 67.  Ibid., MS 379, fo. 169. 68.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 289. 69.  Ibid., MS 379, fo. 60. 70.  Primitive Practise, sig. A3r. See Anthony Milton, “Licensing, Censorship and Religion in Early Stuart England,” HJ (September 1998): 625–51. 71.  BL MS Harl. 383, fo. 106v. 72.  Autobiography, fo. 83v (1:283). For other examples, see fos. 99v (1:333); 153r (2:81); 163v (2:117). 73.  Ibid., fo. 118v (1:402). On fo. 156, his insertion of a Latin letter to de Thou’s son that he wrote on December 16/26, 1637 in the midst of his discussion of his purchase of de Thou’s book in July 1633 suggests that by late 1637 he had reached the summer of 1633 in his narrative. Halliwell omitted the letter. 74.  See above, pp. 120–23. 75. Autobiography, fo. 148r (2:64–65). What D’Ewes regarded as “popish” ceremonial practices were not in fact emphasized by Arminius in Holland, although Laud, Wren, and other anti-Calvinists in England did. 76.  Ibid., fo. 162r (2:112). 77.  Ibid., fos. 162v–63r (2:113–14). 78.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 19. 79.  He used the same metaphor in a letter to Weckherlin written on May 29, 1637, to refer to the Marian prelates: “the pawes and talons of the cruell English Bishopps.” BL Add. MS 72439, fo. 40. I am grateful to Jordan Downs for drawing my attention to this letter. 80.  BL Harl. MS 377,fos. 171v–72r (2:141–43). Simonds also wrote here that he had elsewhere “set down at large,” meaning at length, his “discourse with him.” If it survives in the D’Ewes archive, I have been unable to find it.

Notes to Chapter 5 81.  A year later, Laud related that Wren had “deserved well of the Church of England.” Laud, The Complete Works of William Laud, ed. W. Scott and J. Bliss (Oxford, 1847-60), 5:331, 341. 82.  POSLP 2:146. 83.  Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in Early Modern England, 1500– 1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). 84.  The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1614 (London: Macmillan, 1993), 85. 85.  BL Harl. MS 593, fo. 167v. 86.  Ibid., MS 385, fo. 71. 87.  Ibid., MS 593, fo. 167r. The Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts identifies the hand as Ryece’s. Further confirmation comes from the fact that the author discussed his interest in the genealogy of the Waldegrave family (which Simonds also studied) and promised to supply his findings about it to Simonds as soon as his health permitted. Ryece’s one signed letter to D’Ewes is in the same hand as this fragment (dated September 14, 1636; BL Harl. MS 376, fo. 149r). 88.  Ibid. MS 593, fo. 167r. 89.  BL MS Harl. 377, fo. 281. Green was sequestered on October 18, 1644. WR, 336. 90.  Ibid., MS Add. 15,520, fo. 59r. This volume consists of Ryece’s collection of “the antiquities of Suffolk” (written in the mid-1650s). 91. Ibid., MS Harl. 593, fols. 159r–61v. See, for example, his draft of the beginning of “Great Brittaines Strengh & Weaknes” (ibid., MS 339, fos. 102–4) and his prolegomenon to his history of England (ibid., MS 593, fos. 13–15). This may have been one of the “Discourses” that Simonds sent to Elizabeth of Bohemia. He mentioned them immediately after his reference to the Laurence sermon discussed above and said that one dealt with spiritual matters. Ibid., MS 377, fo. 134. 92.  Ibid., fo. 159r. On the timing of his reading of de Thou, see Autobiography, fo. 167r (2:128–29). 93.  BL MS Harl. 593, fo. 159v. 94. Ibid. 95.  Ibid., fo. 160r. 96.  Ibid., fo. 160v. 97.  Ibid., fo. 161v. Ixworth is just over a mile north of Stowlangtoft. 98.  Primitive Practise (London, 1645), 1. Quotations are from “The second Impression, more exact then the former.” It is the same as the first except that the errata listed in the first have been corrected and a small number of words changed. It also bears a commendation from the parliamentary licenser, John Bachiler, who described it as “richly furnished with variety of learned and select Story, eminently usefull for common information against persecution meerly for Conscience sake,” sig. A 2v. It was printed for Richard Overton, a bookseller well known for publishing Leveller tracts. 99. Ibid., 65. On p. 4, he denounced the Saxon Lutherans for their alliance with “the Popish party” rather than with “the purer Churches of Christendome, of the French and Helvetick confession.” For other evidence of his identification of the Huguenot and Swiss “Evangelicall party” as “orthodox” in doctrine and piety and his detestation of the Lutherans, see pp. 34, 40, 50, 51. 100. Ibid., 28. 101. Ibid., 1, 57. 102. Ibid., 48. 103. Ibid., 2–3. 104. Ibid., 1. 105. Ibid., 3. Following his usual practice of distinguishing between different kinds of Roman Catholics, Simonds noted that the “Pseudo-Lutherans” in

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Notes to Chapter 5 Saxony required the ministers there “to subscribe, amongst other Articles, to that monstrous error of the Ubiquity of Christs body, exploded with just derision by Bellarmine, and all Learned Papists”; pp. 4–5. On pp. 6–7, he surveyed the opinions of St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, and many others in the early history of Christianity to show that they opposed the use of any means other than banishment against heretics. 106. Ibid., 57–60. 107. Ibid., 60. On pp. 6–7, he cited de Thou to the effect that “the most learned and best Romanists of our age . . . did alwayes abhorre the shedding of bloud in matters that meerly concern Religion.” 108.  Ibid., pp. 61–63. De Thou dedicated his History to Henry IV. 109.  BL Harley 593, fo. 84r. 110.  Henry, Archdeacon of Huntington, Historia Anglorum, ed. and trans. Diana Greenway (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 81, 83. 111.  Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, ed. Michael D. Reeve, trans. Neil Wright (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007), 118–30. 112.  Primitive Practise, 33–34, 36. 113. Ibid., 36–37. 114. Ibid., 21–23. Even Henry IV himself did not escape Simonds’s censure, albeit in a notebook rather than this treatise: “I neuer wondred at Henrie of Bourbon that hee changed his religion once I heard he was soe much devoted to the change of women. For tis impossible that the scandalous liuer should bee established in the truth or persist in anie religion further then it carries safetie & conveniencie with it, or else from some outward & by respect as applause, desire to work reveng or raise some faction by it.” Victoria and Albert Museum, Forster MS 149, fo. 107. 115.  Primitive Practise, 25–27. On p. 36 in the first impression, Simonds referred to “these goatish Priests and Prelates,” whereas the second has “lustfull.” Neither is mentioned on the errata list at the end of the first issue. For drafts of chs. 16–19 in Simonds’s hand, see BL Harl. MS 593, fos. 141r–52v. The draft has “goatish” on fo. 152v. 116.  Primitive Practise, 64–65. 117.  BL Harl. MS 167, fo. 105r. 118.  Ibid., MS 593, fo. 139r & v. 119.  Ibid., MS 287, fo. 265; MS 386, fos. 156, 157. Moundeford represented Norfolk in the Long Parliament until his death in 1643 and addressed Simonds as his “his much honoured frend & kinsman.” 120.  Ibid., MS 385, fo. 92. Although Browne gave the day and month, he omitted the year. Either 1638 or 1639 is possible. Browne added a postscript: “my office is yet to preach to some 4 or 5 greate familyes I know not whether I shall settle heere, if it proue not a church I suppose I shall not.” Thus the letter and report were written before he was appointed to his position in the church at Sudbury. The details Simonds drew from Browne’s report in his January 1640 letter to Joachimi (discussed below) argue for 1639. 121. Venn, 1:232. 122.  Edward Everett Hale, Jr., ed., Note-Book Kept by Thomas Lechford, Esq., Lawyer, In Boston, Massachusetts Bay, From June 27, 1638, to July 29, 1641 (Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, 1885), 130. On the Watertown matter, see ODNB, s.v. “D’Ewes, Simonds,” and Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle, eds., The Journal of John Winthrop (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 742–43. 123.  BL Harl. MS 385, fo. 92.

Notes to Chapter 6  124.  Ibid., fo. 93r & v. 125.  Ibid., fo. 93v. 126.  Ibid., fo. 94r & v. The Dyer birth occurred on October 17, 1637, eight and a half months before Browne’s arrival. The description of Mary Dyer’s fetus is similar to but contains a few details not in John Winthrop’s account, which was published later. See David Hall, The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), 199–310. 127.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 278. 128.  Ibid., fo. 280. 129.  Ibid., fo. 281. 130.  Ibid., fo. 282. The details he offered differed in some particulars from those he received a bit later from Browne but were not contrary to or inconsistent with them. 131.  Ibid., fo. 298. Dated January 25, 1639/February 4, 1640.

Chapter 6: “An Iliad of miseries”—1639–1640 1.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 301. 2.  See above, p. 83. 3.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 60. 4.  Ibid., fo. 178. 5.  Ibid., fo. 61. See Salt, 269, n. 85. 6. Salt, 265. 7.  BL Harl. MS 373, fo. 139 (dated November 21, 1627). 8.  Ibid., MS 386, fo. 148. Others who helped in this cause were the earl of Arundel and the Lord Chamberlain (the earl of Pembroke) and his secretary. See Salt, 264. “Pricking for sheriff” describes the process, in use from Elizabeth I’s reign, of presenting the monarch with a list of names on parchment. The monarch then, using a bodkin (knife), “pricked” the name of the man to be appointed. 9.  BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 156. Damage to the letter makes the signer’s surname inaccessible. For more on the reasons behind the choice of D’Ewes as sheriff, see Salt, 262–64. 10.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 297. 11.  Ibid., MS 387, fo. 82. 12.  Ibid., MS 385, fos. 50, 52. 13.  Ibid., fo. 107. Cf. fo. 47 for Nathaniel Bacon’s letter from Gray’s Inn on November 9. Bacon was “sory for the occasion” but urged Simonds to bestow the undershrivalty “uppon the last undersheriff. . . . I am told he will give you good security.” 14.  Ibid., MS 382, fo. 48. 15.  Unless he was thinking of the disputed succession and civil war that followed Henry I’s death in 1135, it is not obvious why he chose the twelfth century for such obloquy. 16.  Autobiography, fo. 168r & v (2:131). It should be remembered that he had consulted Crooke about the behavior of Judge Hyde in 1631 and been gratified by his answer. See p. 190 above. 17.  For more on this theme, see Salt, 259–62, 18.  Autobiography, fos. 168r–69r (2:131–34). 19.  Ibid., fo. 169r–69v (2:134–35). 20.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 298 (February 4, 1640). 21.  Ibid., fo. 31 (January 23, 1639/40). 22.  Ibid., MS 593, fo. 192v. 23.  Ibid., fo. 193r.

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Notes to Chapter 6 24.  Ibid., fo. 194v. 25. Cust, 12–21. 26.  BL Harl. MS 593, fo. 205r (from his reading notes). 27. Salt, 266. 28.  BL Harl. MS 166, fo. 279r. See ibid., MS 365, fo. 172r, for his deployment of the cases of Trajan and Henry IV in a letter he wrote on September 14, 1640. 29.  Ibid., fo. 279v. 30.  Ibid., fos. 279v–80r. 31.  Ibid., fo. 280v. 32. Salt, 262. 33.  BL Harl. MS 376, fo. 130. 34.  Ibid., fos. 267–68. 35.  Ibid., MS 384, fo. 64; MS 386, fo. 318v. 36.  Ibid., MS 7660, fo. 23. 37.  Ibid., MS 376, fo. 172r. See Salt (pp. 274–75) for the reasons that this was probably to Pembroke. 38. Salt, 270. 39.  BL Harl. MS 365, fo. 43r. 40. Salt, 271–72. He also said in the letter to Pembroke that his certainty about the dire situation of the taxpayers was based on what he was told by “many high constables, (who are the ablest men to discouer and knowe the trueth thereof).” 41.  BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 144. Salt, 279. 42.  Ibid., MS 386, fo. 106. 43.  Ibid., MS 383, fo. 174. 44.  Ibid., fo. 172. 45.  Ibid., MS 365, fo. 156r. 46. Salt, 282. 47. Ibid., 282, 285–87. 48.  Matthew Reynolds, Godly Reformers and Their Opponents in Early Modern England: Religion in Norwich, c. 1560–1643 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2005), 218. 49.  BL Harl. MS 365, fo. 142r. 50.  Ibid., fo. 148r. 51.  Ibid., fo. 153r. 52.  Ibid., MS 382, fo. 144r. 53.  Ibid., MS 365, fo. 145r. He also urged Simonds to keep until Easter the book he had sent, presumably assuming that Stow Hall was safer than Cambridge from the Scottish horde. 54.  Ibid., MS 374, fos. 129r, 130r. He was appointed Cambridge’s first professor of Arabic in 1632 and lectured on Anglo-Saxon from 1640. His patrons included Sir Henry Spelman and the London merchant Thomas Adams. ODNB, s.v. “Wheelocke, Abraham.” 55.  BL Harl. MS 376, fo. 41. 56.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 31r. 57.  Ibid., MS 374, fo. 131r. 58.  Ibid., fo. 131v. In the margin, Wheelock added that he was “resolved to fall out with all here, rather then you should want any monuments in this vniversity.” 59. Ibid. 60.  Ibid., fo. 133r. Simonds considered this point highly significant and drew upon it in his letter to Heinsius. See ibid., MS 377, fo. 43. 61.  Ibid., MS 374 fo. 133r & v. 62.  Ibid., MS 378, fo. 45.

Notes to Chapter 6  63.  Ibid., fo. 50v. 64.  Ibid., MS 374, fo. 138r. 65.  Ibid., MS 376, fo. 130. 66.  J. A. F. Bekkers, ed., Correspondence of John Morris with Johannes de Laet (1634–1649) (Assen: Van Gorcum and Comp. N.V., 1970), xv–xvii. 67.  BL Harl. MS 378, fo. 49. 68.  BL Add. MS 34,601, fo. 6r & v. 69.  BL Harl. MS 377, fos. 212–13. In this letter, Simonds also urged De Laet to return the three books he had borrowed from Patrick Young at the king’s library. The “specimen” of the lexicon is in BL Add. MS 34,601, fo. 7r. 70.  BL Harl. MS 374, fo. 207. 71. Coates, 205. 72. Autobiography, fo. 44v (1:130). Halliwell misread this description as “goodly” rather than “godlie.” He also omitted the Latin elegy that Simonds wrote about Montagu and placed at this point in his work. He wrote it at the request of his tutor, Richard Holdsworth. 73.  Ibid., fos. 46v, 57r (1:137, 182). 74.  Ibid., fo. 61v (1:201). 75.  BL Harl. MS 378, fo. 53. 76.  Ibid., MS 379, fo. 75. 77.  Ibid., MS 378, fos. 46–47. 78.  Ibid., fo. 47. 79.  Ibid., fo. 53. His July 7/17 letter to Joachimi described the deaths of Adrian and (six days later) little Geva in heartbreaking detail. Ibid., MS 377, fo. 302. 80.  Ibid., MS 374, fo. 151. 81.  Ibid., MS 378, fo. 52. 82.  Ibid., MS 382, fo. 88. 83.  Ibid., MS 383, fo. 182. 84.  Ibid., MS 386, fo. 75. 85.  Ibid., fo. 69. 86.  Ibid., MS 377, fos. 210–11. 87.  Ibid., MS 378, fo. 55v. See ibid., MS 165, fos. 11r–12r, for the king’s writ for holding the election (dated September 24) and Simonds’s letter to his bailiffs on the subject. He noted that he received the royal order on October 8, and he wrote to the bailiffs on the same day. 88.  Ibid., MS 374, fo. 157r. 89.  Ibid., MS 384, fo. 64r. 90.  Ibid., MS 7660, fo. 23. Sudbury’s mayor thanked him for an earlier gift to Sudbury’s poor in January. Ibid., MS 365, fo. 46. 91.  Ibid., MS 384, fo. 65r. 92.  Ibid., fo. 66r. 93. Ibid., 383, fo. 186r. 94.  POSLP 1:508, 511. 95.  BL Harl. MS 374, fo. 174. 96.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 204v. See fo. 203 (D’Ewes to Wheelock, November 12, 1640) for more on his horror of idolatrous worship. 97.  Ibid., fo. 303r. 98.  POSLP 1:161. 99. Anne wrote to him from Ixworth on January 17, 1641, “at Mr Ryues chamber in the Pomp Court in the Middle Temple.” BL Harl. MS 379 fo. 112v. 100.  See BL Harl. MS 386, fos. 52, 53, 55. For a letter he wrote from “Goates Alley” on April 27 to Lady Denton, see ibid., MS 379, fo. 83. But on July 21, he

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Notes to Chapter 6 referred in his journal to his “lodging in Milbanke Lane.” POSLP 6:41. Since Hornigold would certainly have known where he was, it is probable that this was one and the same place. He received several letters in 1642 that were directed to “his lodging neere the Parliament stayres by the White Lyon Taverne” (see ibid., MS 382, fo. 105, and MS 383, fos. 199, 203). Letters in May 1646 were directed to him “at his Lodging in the Stable yard without Westminste” (ibid., MS 384, fos. 212, 215). Whether all these describe the same house or several different ones, they confirm his nearness to the House of Commons. On Hollar’s 1675 map of London, the Parliament Stairs appear a short distance to the east of the Palace Yard. 101.  PJLP-2:116–17. 102.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 187. Fo. 188 is Richard’s letter to Anne, which he would have enclosed with this one to Simonds. 103.  Ibid., MS 387, fo. 122. He received another letter sent to this address dated August 12, 1643, from his second wife’s great aunt, Mary Landen. Ibid., MS 386, fo. 119. 104. Ibid., 1:187, 190. On the franchise question, see Hirst, 81–82. See p. 186 for the select committee. His entry mentions two speeches rather than three. 105.  BL Harl. 379, fo. 73. For the “record” from 46 Ed. III, see POSLP 1:190. 106.  POSLP 1:210. 107. Ibid., 228. 108.  PJLP-3:280, 348. 109. Ibid., 158. 110.  POSLP 5:163. June 15, 1641. 111.  “Paying One’s D’Ewes,” Parliamentary History 14, no. 2 (1995): 179–86. 112.  BL Harl. MS 166, fo. 279r. 113.  POSLP 1:253, 309, 324, 328. See also 1:477, 614, 626. For more examples, see PJ 1:109, 123, 179, 181, 363; 2:234. 114. POSLP 2:523, 524. See also pp. 163, 502, 511, 699, 702, 717, 787, 797. 115. Ibid., 3:154–56. See also 6:379, 382; and PJ 1:109, 179, 363. 116. POSLP 5:28. 117. Ibid., 5:94. He could, of course, have manufactured statements by others who praised his remarks, but it seems unlikely because he did it so rarely. 118.  See, for example, POSLP for December 29–31, 1640, January 1–2, 1641, August 20–31, 1641, September 2, 1641. 119.  Writing of the parliaments of the 1620s, Conrad Russell stated that “it is unlikely that, even on the best-reported days, more than a quarter of the words spoken in the Commons are preserved.” If the percentage is slightly higher for the early years of the Long Parliament, it is only because of D’Ewes’s journal. Russell, PEP, xviii. 120.  “‘The unweariableness of Mr Pym’: Influence and Eloquence in the Long Parliament,” in Susan Amussen and Mark Kishlansky, eds., Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 36–37. 121.  POSLP 2:393. For D’Ewes’s list, see 390–92. 122. Bruce, Review, 84. 123.  BL Harl. MS 374, fo. 166. 124.  POSLP 6:7, 10. 125.  BL Harl. MS 165, fo. 217v. See Coates, 230–31, for D’Ewes’s ingenious reply to Sir John Culpepper, after which “many laughed at the impertinency” of Culpepper’s objection. 126.  POSLP 2:498–500.

Notes to Chapter 7 127. Ibid., 5:496. 128. Coates, 247–48. Sir John Holland mentioned this remark in his diary, February 20, 1641. 129.  PJLP-1:512. 130.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 255. 131.  POSLP 1:525. Bagshaw’s speech, later published, was delivered on December 9, whereas Simonds’s letter is dated December 7. He probably began writing it on the 7th and completed it on the 9th or later. He apologized that he had to have his secretary write the fair copy, thus confirming that he was employing a secretary at this early stage of the Long Parliament. 132.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 75. 133. Ibid. 134.  Ibid., fo. 77, December 14, 1640. 135.  Ibid., fo. 111. 136.  POSLP 1:269. 137. Ibid., 1:271. 138. Ibid., 1:76, 88. 139. Ibid., 1:227. 140. Ibid., 1:260. This is from John Moore’s journal. D’Ewes’s journal does not mention this speech. 141. Ibid., 1:308, 309, 320, 591; 6:355. On the Etcetera Oath, see above, pp. 302, 314, 317, 386. 142. Ibid., 1:373, 382. Gawdy also mentioned this speech. Ibid., 377. 143.  POSLP 1:669. 144. Ibid., 1:566. 145. Ibid., 1:571 (see pp. 571–75 for the text of the petition). 146. Ibid., 1:566–67. 147. Ibid., 1:356, 461. 148. Ibid., 1:469n, 473, 477, 657–58. By February 13, 1641, the books had been found and were returned to Coke’s executors. POSLP 2:442. 149. Ibid., 1:490, 592–93. 150. Ibid., 1:468–69, 569. 151. Ibid., 1:482–83, 487. 152. Ibid., 1:488–89, 512–17. 153. Ibid., 1:670. 154.  Ibid.. For the 1614 incident, see Maija Jansson, Proceedings in Parliament 1614 (House of Commons) (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1988), 279. 155. Ibid., 2:3–6. 156. Ibid., 2:6–7. 157. Ibid., 2:21, 18.

Chapter 7: “Stub vp the rootes of all our mischifes” (December, 1640—July, 1642) 1.  BL Harl. MS 384, fo. 66r. See above, p. 304. 2.  POSLP 1:185, 187–88. On this election, see Sir Ralph Verney, Notes of Proceedings in the Long Parliament (London: Camden Society, 1845), 31:1–4. 3.  POSLP 1:566. 4. Ibid., 2:363. 5. Ibid., 3:236–37. 6. Ibid., 2:612–13. On the Tewkesbury and Salisbury election disputes, see Hirst, 82–88.

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Notes to Chapter 7 7.  POSLP 2:585–86. For another incident in which a bill failed to pass because MPs did not want to “lose their places,” see p. 530. 8. Russell, FBM, 279. 9.  POSLP 1:621. 10. Ibid., 5:90. 11. Coates, 242–43. D’Ewes and others were named to a committee to determine whether Dearlove had been engaged in his father-in-law’s illegal activities. See also PJLP-3:447–48 on the Knaresborough election. For Gerard’s motion, see PJLP2:63. 12.  PJLP-2:63. 13.  POSLP 1:655; 2:517. For the report of this committee and discussion of it in the House, see POSLP 5:515–23 (July 6, 1641). 14.  POSLP 2:224. 15.  PJLP-1:63–64. 16.  POSLP 1:589. 17.  PJLP-1:63–64 (January 14, 1642). For another example, see PJLP-1:503-4. 18.  Chris R. Kyle, Theater of State: Parliament and Political Culture in Early Stuart England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), ch. 2. 19.  POSLP 4:99. A manuscript copy of the speech survived and is reproduced on pp. 99–100. 20. Ibid., 4:96–97. 21. Ibid., 2:398–99, 396. 22. Ibid., 2:46, 63–65. 23. Ibid., 2:65. 24.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 79. Writing to his wife, he included copies of the Root and Branch Petition and other important documents. Anne was to bring them with her when she next came to London. 25. Cust, 279. 26.  POSLP 2:781. 27. Ibid., 4:111. 28. Ibid., 1:186. 29. Ibid., 2:53. 30. Ibid., 1:589. 31. Ibid., 2:780–81. 32. Ibid., 2:237–38. 33. Ibid., 3:334. Compare his heated response to Selden’s argument that the House of Commons was “not sufficiently authorized to treat of this business” on February 3, pp. 352–54. On March 6, he opposed suggestions that some of the money intended for the Scottish army be diverted to the royal army. See pp. 650–51. 34. Ibid., 3:413–14. 35. Ibid., 3:416–17. 36. Ibid., 4:509. 37. Ibid., 2:500, 520, 547. 38. Ibid., 2:562–64. 39. Ibid., 3:516. 40. Ibid., 3:569. Compare his further condemnation of Strafford on April 17. 41.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 69. 42.  POSLP 4:274. 43.  BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 90. I am grateful to Diane Willen for drawing my attention to this letter. See her article “‘Communion of the Saints’: Spiritual Reciprocity and the Godly Community in Early Modern England,” Albion 27, no. 1 (1995): 39–40 for more from this correspondence.

Notes to Chapter 7 44.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 81. 45.  POSLP 2:173. 46.  POSLP 2:183–84. 47. Ibid., 2:32–33. For some of the contents of the petition, see p. 533. 48. Ibid., 124–25. 49. Ibid., 145. 50. Ibid., 373. For his opposition to organs, see pp. 508–9 (February 22, 1641). For his support of Harley’s bill “against bowing to or towards the altar or communion table, see POSLP :388. 51. Ibid., 546. For his support of Pym’s proposed impeachment of Laud for high treason, see pp. 530–32. 52. Ibid., 3:51. He quoted Bishop Ussher as having told him that “he would not be diverted from his studies to be Lord Chancellor.” See p. 52. 53. Ibid., 4:606–7. 54. Russell, FBM, 344. 55.  POSLP 4:608. 56. Ibid., 5:90–91. Simonds (perhaps later) suspected that Pym and the others expected him to speak on the bill “yet concealed their intendment from me that so I might do below myself in speaking.” On the day, Marshall assured Simonds that “they were sure of me.” 57. Ibid., 5:92–93. Compare Russell, FBM, 344–45. 58.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 112v. 59.  Ibid., MS 384, fo. 27. 60.  Ibid, MS 379, fos. 8, 187 188. On April 27, Simonds told Anne that he was sure “that my brother Eliot will returne soe compleatlie fraighted & furnished with newes as yow will spare mee from writing till next weeke anie large relation.” She was still in Surrey on May 26. Ibid., fo. 87. At that point she was preparing to return to Suffolk via London 61.  POSLP 5:654. Although he received congratulatory letters from his friends when he received the baronetcy, this is his only mention of it. Desperate for money to fight the Scots, Charles I had revived his father’s practice of selling titles of honor. I am grateful to Richard Cust for information on this point. Whether Simonds bought it or it was an attempt to win his allegiance at this stage is uncertain. A payment of £541 9s 6d to the Exchequer for “taking out my Masters Pattent” appears in his account book early in October may be the payment for the baronetcy. BL Harl. MS 7660, fo. 35. 62.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 89r. 63.  Ibid., MS 386, fo. 52r & v. 64.  Ibid., fo. 53. 65.  Ibid., MS 387, fo. 14. 66.  POSLP 5:105. The middle English word for “burnt” is “brent.” 67.  BL Harl. MS 385, fo. 170. Damport’s letter was dated July 28, and the burial service was performed in St. George Stowlangtoft that evening. He urged Simonds to “be comforted your noble and most deare Consort hath changed this world for a better. Let god who gaue hir, haue hir. . . . though all our streets sound with Lamentacion Mourning and woe.” 68.  POSLP 6:105. 69. Ibid., 181. 70.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 89r. 71.  Ibid., fo. 89r & v. 72.  Ibid., fo. 89v. The book was Nicholas Byfield’s The Marrow of the Oracles of God (1630).

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Notes to Chapter 7 73.  Ibid., fo. 90r & v. The questionnaire described in the next paragraph is on fos. 91r–93v. 74.  Ibid., fo. 92r. For Downes, see above, pp. 234–35. 75.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 304. 76.  Ibid., MS 386, fo. 57. 77.  Ibid., MS 379, fos 89v–90r. 78.  Ibid., fo. 94r. 79.  Ibid., fo. 94v. 80.  Ibid., MS 385, fo. 205. 81.  POSLP 6:240–41. See pp. 333, 337 for his next comments on this subject (August 10). On the next day, he compared the Army plotters Jermyn and Percy to the perpetrators of the Gunpowder Treason (pp. 371–74). 82. Ibid., 6:355–57. 83. Ibid., 6:582–83. 84. Ibid., 6:614. Ironically, on August 16 Simonds had spoken in favor of the power of the two houses to issue ordinances and provided a (mistaken) precedent for it from 1373. Ibid., 6:434. 85. Ibid., 6:626. On October 20, he would defend this statute against its critics by arguing that it merely removed “those superstitions and innovations which divers of the Prelates and Clergymen had introduced against Law.” The statute he had in mind had been passed in Elizabeth’s first Parliament, “by which all popery and superstition are abolished.” Coates, 20. 86.  POSLP 6:634–37. His speech also included the remark that ministers should not be required “to read over the whole according to Bishop Wren’s injunction.” 87. Ibid., 6:713–15. 88. Ibid., 6:706–7. See Coates, 1. 89. Coates, 6–7. 90. Ibid., 10. 91. Ibid., 14–15. Conrad Russell characterized Simonds’s speech as “an interesting example of members’ tendency to fall back on basic reflexes when faced with events they did not understand.” FBM, 409. 92. Coates, 45–46. 93. Ibid., 51–53. He did, however, defend Holdsworth against Oliver Cromwell’s objections, saying that he knew his former tutor “to be a most learned man” who would be “most ready to further a reformation in the church.” 94.  The Nature of the English Revolution (London: Longman, 1993), 9. 95. Coates, 61. 96. Ibid., 83–84. On December 18, he spoke in favor of a bill for the impressment of mariners (p. 316). 97. Ibid., 91–92. 98. Ibid., 284–85. 99.  BL Harl. MS 383, fos. 193–95. Internal evidence suggests that the letter was addressed to Ussher, who probably passed it on to Simonds. For examples of the reports of alleged atrocities committed by the rebels, see Coates, 283–84. 100.  PJLP-2:233. He handed in this commitment on paper and professed embarrassment when the speaker announced the gift and yielded to the demands of MPs to know who the giver was. “Far greater approbation” followed from his colleagues, “and divers called out to have it entered in the clerk’s Journal.” 101.  Coates, xli. 102.  S. R. Gardiner, ed., The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889), 218–19. 103. Coates, 117.

Notes to Chapter 7 104. Ibid., 143–44. 105. Ibid., 150–52. 106. Ibid., 183–86. 107.  PJLP-1:1–4. 108. Ibid., 1:7–11. 109. Simonds was looking at the account of the event printed by John Rushworth, one of the clerks of the House, while he wrote this. But he omitted the famous line that Rushworth included in which the king said, “Since I see All my Birds are flowen.” Ibid., 9, n. 9. He nevertheless added some observations and information of his own in his journal. 110. Ibid. 111. Ibid., 1:11–13. 112. Ibid., 33–34, 54. Unusually, D’Ewes bound a copy of a broadside containing this letter into his journal. BL Harl. MS 163, fos. 6, 6*. 113.  BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 197. 114. WR, 348. 115.  PJLP-1:45–46. It is also possible that he had not yet learned of the king’s plan to unleash his “ruffians” on the MPs on January 4. 116. Ibid., 64. 117. Ibid., 106. 118. Ibid., 133–34. 119. Ibid., 137–38. 120. Ibid., 480–81. On February 10, he urged approval of the petition of a group of “Oxfordshire knights and gentleman” against “the growing of Arminianism in the University of Oxford.” He said that “the old heresy of Pelagius which hath now of late years gotten the new and foolish appellation of Arminianism” was “a contagion and poison that hath almost overspread the whole Church of England.” p. 337. For his opposition on February 12 to an attempt to authorize bowing at the name of Jesus by those who wished to do it, see pp. 355–56. 121. Ibid., 500–501. He was a nephew of the famous Elizabethan courtier. 122. Ibid., 511–12. On March 8, he made another attempt to reduce the harshness of the language of a petition to the king, in this case the wording being Pym’s. PJLP-2:10. For a clash with Marten on the same day, see p. 11. 123.  PJLP-2:10. 124. Ibid., 116. He repeated this call for avoidance of harsh words and hostile expressions several times. See, for example, ibid., 3:102. 125.  PJLP-2:169–71. 126. Ibid., 181–82. 127. Ibid., 225–26. 128. Ibid., 243. 129. Ibid., 324–25. 130. Ibid., 349–50. 131.  PJLP-1:216. See pp. 368–69 for a conflict with Holles and Strode. Vernon Snow and Anne Steele Young identified Simonds’s “principal antagonists” among his fellow MPs as John Glyn, John Gurdon, Denzil Holles, Henry Marten, Alexander Rigby, “and particularly William Strode, the radical and militant MP from Devonshire.” Ibid., 3:vii. Fiennes can be added to their list. 132. Ibid., 313–14. See Russell, FBM, 461n, for his suggestion that Marten’s statement “sounds like political theory made on the spur of the moment.” 133.  PJLP-2:19. 134. Ibid., 119. The italicized words he entered in cipher. 135. Ibid., 282–83.

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Notes to Chapter 7 136.  BL Harl. MS 383, fo. 203. 137.  BL Harl. 379, fo. 96. He also cited Schomberg’s advice in a speech in the House of Commons on May 20, 1642. See PJLP 2:350. 138.  BL Harl. 379, fo. 197. See ibid., MS 383, fo. 204, for evidence that Richard was once again in the king’s service as a soldier. For Richard’s alleged fornication, see C. H. Hopwood, Middle Temple Records (1904), 2:925. I am grateful to John Sutton for a discussion of this matter. 139.  PJLP-3:44, 16, 256. 140.  BL Harl. MS 483—for example, fos.. 63v, 121r, 140v, 143r, 144v, 150v. 141.  Quoted in Cust, 22. For evidence that Simonds had read James’s book, see above, p. 288. 142.  J. R. Tanner, Constitutional Documents of the Reign of James I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 279. 143.  PJLP-3:21. 144.  PJLP-2:125. 145. Ibid., 2:56. Compare pp. 86, 177, and 192 for additional sparring with Strode. 146. Ibid., 356–57. 147.  PJLP-3:145. 148. Ibid., 158. 149. Ibid., 176. 150. Ibid., 202–3, 208–9, 313–14, 218. 151.  Ibid., xxiv. 152. Ibid., 254, 256. Compare PJLP-2:360–61 for an earlier angry exchange with Fiennes. 153.  PJLP-3:257–59. 154. Ibid., 259. 155. Ibid., 263–64. 156. Ibid., 267. 157. Ibid., 284–85. 158. Ibid., 361–62. 159. Bruce, Review, 93–94.

Chapter 8: “No end . . . but by the sword” 1.  PJLP-1:78. 2. Ibid., 283. The entry is in cipher. On July 7, 1643, he visited his old friend and fellow note-taking MP John Moore. At this moment, Moore was a colonel in Parliamentary service, his house in Lancashire “twice plundered,” and so ill that Simonds, believing his friend was dying, helped him make his will. Because Moore was “in much want,” Simonds asked the Commons to pay £50 of his arrears. Speaker Lenthall intervened to propose £100, a sum Simonds and others seconded and that passed. BL Harl. MS 165v, fo. 119r. 3.  This does not mean that he discontinued his extensive correspondence. Except, however, for Latin letters he wrote to de Laet, the prince elector, and others, drafts of outgoing letters are rare after 1640. But expressions of thanks from his brothers-in-law for the news he sent them kept arriving, and his Latin diaries from 1644–46 mention the writing of letters on most days. It is likely that he sent English letters in his own hand and directed his amanuensis to work on the journal and make fair copies of the Latin letters. 4.  PJLP-3:264. 5. Ibid., 270. 6. Russell, FBM, 500.

Notes to Chapter 8 7.  BL Harl. MS 165, fo. 314v. 8.  Ibid., MS 164, fo. 360v. 9.  Ibid., MS 379, fo. 97. The surname is often spelled Willoughby (and sometimes Willoby), but I will use the version Sir Harry himself did. On Aston, see Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ch. 4. 10.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 99. This is a copy in Simonds’s hand and thus indicates that drafts were being vetted by Elizabeth’s aunt and perhaps Potts to increase their impact on Sir Harry. See ODNB, s.v. “Wynn, Richard” and “Fletcher, Phineas,” ODNB online edn., May 2008. See www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/9738, accessed September 19, 2013. 11.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 100v. 12.  Ibid., fo. 100r. 13.  Ibid., MS 384, fo. 251. He provided the month and year but not the day he wrote this letter, but it clearly preceded the August 18 and 19 letters to him from Simonds and Potts discussed below. 14.  Ibid., MS 386, fo. 233. 15.  Ibid., MS 379, fo. 101r. This is in Hornigold’s hand with minor corrections and changes in Simonds’s. 16. Ibid. 17.  Ibid., MS 386, fo. 234. 18.  Ibid., MS 379, fo. 102. 19.  Ibid., MS 384, fo. 253. 20.  Ibid., MS 379, fo. 194r & v. 21.  Ibid., fo. 104. According to his journal, Simonds did not go to the House at all on September 19 and 20. Ibid., MS 163, fo. 372v. 22.  POSLP 4:6. 23.  BL Harl. MS 377, fo. 220. 24.  Ibid., MS 382, fo. 145. Compare MS 163, fo. 381v. 25.  Ibid., MS 286, fo. 321. 26.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 202. 27.  Ibid., fo. 208. 28.  Ibid., MS 384, fo. 182. 29.  Ibid., MS 379, fo. 127. 30.  Ibid., MS 384, fo. 4. On December 26, she thanked Simonds for his “pretious lines” to her and assured him that “they are most welcome & shall be tresurd vp, as choyce jewels.” Ibid., fo. 6. 31.  Ibid., MS 379, fo. 105. 32.  Ibid., fo. 129. 33.  Ibid., fo. 137. 34.  PJLP-3:321–22. 35. Ibid., 333. 36. Ibid., 341–42. This passage mentions, among other incidents of pillaging, the attacks in Essex and Suffolk on the houses of Sir John Lucas, Countess Rivers, and others. See John Walter’s account of these events in his Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 17, 31–45. D’Ewes had already made some of these points in a speech in the House on June 8. See PJLP-3:44–45. 37.  See above, pp. 69ff. 38.  PJLP-3:342–43. 39.  BL Harl. MS 163, fo. 376r. 40.  Ibid., fos. 381v, 382v. He requested leave again on October 8.

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Notes to Chapter 8 41.  Ibid., MS 164, fos. 11v, 174v. 42.  Ibid., fo. 9v. 43.  Ibid., fo. 31v. 44.  Ibid., fos. 38r, 40r. 45.  Ibid., fo. 56v. 46.  Ibid., fo. 99r & v. 47.  Ibid., fos.101v–102r. 48.  Ibid., fos. 106r, 108v. 49.  Ibid., fo. 243r. 50.  Ibid., fo. 248r & v. 51.  Ibid., fos. 271r–273r. 52.  Ibid., fo. 273r. 53.  Ibid., fo. 275r & v. He persevered in his efforts to prevent the violenti from lengthening the list of those who would receive no pardon for opposing the Parliament. On September 19, 1644, for example, he spoke against those who wanted Lord Littleton to remain on the list of those who would be punished. Littleton, he said, had done “good service” by supporting the Militia Ordinance in 1642, and his delivery of the broad seal to the king at York was “rather enforced than voluntary. . . . We must not write men’s good deeds in sand and to inscribe their demerits in steel.” Ibid., MS 166, fos. 114v, 123r. 54.  Ibid., fo. 275v. 55.  Ibid., fos. 295r–96v. 56.  Ibid., fo. 359 (April 7). 57.  Ibid., fo. 376v. 58.  Ibid., MS 382, fo. 18. 59.  Ibid., fo. 19. 60.  Ibid., fo. 108. 61.  Ibid., MS 379, fo. 196. 62.  History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars of England (Oxford, 1849), 3:20. 63.  BL Harl. MS 164, fo. 329r. It should be remembered that his opinion of Edward’s uncle Lawrence was even more scathing. See above, pp. 189–90. 64.  Ibid., fos. 376v–77v, 401v. Sir Arthur Aston was a cousin of Sir Thomas. 65.  TNA PROB 11/212/835. 66.  BL Harl. MS 164, fos. 386v–87v. 67.  Members of the Sequestration Committee labeled at one point or another as fiery spirits included Sir Peter Wentworth, Dennis Bond, Cornelius Holland, John Glyn, Miles Corbett, and John Gurdon. I thank Stephen Roberts for letting me read a draft of his essay on the Committee for Sequestration that will appear in the History of Parliament Trust volumes now in preparation. 68.  BL Harl. MS 165, fos. 95v–96v. Richard Ryece, the Suffolk antiquary, noted in about 1655 that in his will Richard “gaue monys . . . to build an Almshouse. . . . A fair Almshouse is since built accordingly in Stowlangtoft by Sir Simonn Dewes his brother.” BL Add. MS, 15520, fo. 73r. In April 1649, Simonds paid £315 6s 8d to compound for his brother’s “delinquency.” Calendar, Committee for Compounding: Part 3 (1891), 1958–2000. 69.  BL Harl. MS 163, fo. 319r. On Gurdon’s being “distasted” by the House of Commons for a motion “against the whole house of Peers,” see ibid., MS 164, fo. 379r (April 25, 1643). 70.  Ibid., MS 164, fo. 301v. For the others, see fos. 296v, 303r, 304r, and ibid. fo. 93v. On the ideological and personal kinship between Rous and Pym, see my “A ‘Carkass’ of ‘Mere Dead Paper’; The Polemical Career of Francis Rous, Puritan MP,” Huntington Library Quarterly 72 (2009): 347–71.

Notes to Chapter 8 71.  BL Harl. MS 164, fo. 321v. 72.  Ibid., fo. 324r. 73.  The Reign of King Pym (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941), 53. 74.  POSLP, 2:612–13. 75.  BL Harl. MS 164, fo. 348v. 76.  Ibid., fo. 361v. 77.  Ibid., fo. 326r. 78.  Ibid., fos. 373v–74v. Marten and Strode had another go at Northumberland on June 29, but Simonds’s speech in the earl’s defense was successful. Ibid., MS 165, fos. 103r–4v. 79.  Ibid., MS 165, fo. 97r & v. I am grateful to Jordan Downs for drawing my attention to this episode. 80.  Ibid., fos. 180v, 152r. 81.  Ibid., fo. 93r. He admitted here, however, that there were in the following months times when he was “in the country” and provided no additions to the journal, and other days when his notes “are so abstractedly & confusedly taken as they are like to be hereafter utterly useless” to future readers. 82.  Ibid., fo. 96r. 83.  Ibid., fo. 122v. 84.  Ibid., fos. 124r–25r. 85.  Ibid., fos. 137r–39v. 86.  Ibid., fos. 139v–40r. 87.  Ibid., fo. 140r & v. He had also told the tale of Malatesta and the Florentines on July 11 in his speech in support of the earl of Essex’s call for a peace treaty. 88.  Ibid., fos. 141r–42r. 89.  Ibid., fo. 146r. 90.  Ibid., fos. 147v–48v. 91.  Ibid., fos 149r–50r. 92.  Ibid., fo. 147v. 93.  Ibid., MS 164, fo. 392r. 94.  Ibid., MS 165, fos. 93v–94r. 95.  Ibid., fo. 113v. 96.  Ibid., fo. 127v. 97.  Ibid., fo. 156r. 98.  Ibid., MS 164, fo. 346v. 99.  Ibid., fo. 395r. 100.  Ibid., fo. 151r. 101.  Ibid., MS 166, fo. 268v. 102.  Ibid., MS 164, fo. 40r. 103.  Ibid., fo. 362v. 104.  Autobiography, fo. 75r (1:255–56). For D’Ewes’s disapproval of the role he thought Selden had played in the Parliament of 1628, see above, pp. 151, 439 (n. 102). On November 18, 1643, Simonds opposed the earl of Essex’s proposal to establish a court in London “to execute martial law,” and Selden spoke in support of his motion. BL Harl. MS 165, fo. 210v. On January 3, 1644, Simonds presented a committee report for a motion to end the sequestration of certain revenues of the University of Cambridge. When it was moved that Selden would carry the bill up to the House of Lords, Selden “did stand up and very ingenuously and modestly” urge that Simonds have the honor of carrying it instead. Ibid., fo. 267r. 105.  BL Harl. MS 164, fo. 380r & v. 106.  Ibid., fo. 381r. For more on his objections to this oath and the motives he ascribed to the fiery spirits, see ibid., MS 165, fo. 128v (July 22, 1643).

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Notes to Chapter 8 107.  On this and other oaths, see Edward Vallance, Revolutionary England and the National Covenant (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005). 108.  BL Harl. MS 165, fos. 158v–59r. 109.  Ibid., fo. 162r. 110.  Ibid., fo. 162r & v. 111.  Ibid., fo. 163r. 112.  Ibid., fo. 222r & v. For the list of MPs who took the Covenant on September 25, see John Rushworth, Historical Collections (1721), 5:480. 113.  BL Harl. MS 166, fo. 106r. 114.  Ibid., MS 165, fo. 105r. 115.  Ibid., fo. 177v. 116.  Ibid., MS 166, fo. 1. Other days on which he spent time in the assembly include February 20, 22, 24, and 26 in 1644. 117.  Ibid., fo. 152r & v. 118.  Ibid., MS 165, fo. 196v. 119.  On the wider context of the publication of D’Ewes’s Primitive Practise for Preserving Truth, see my article, “Sir Simonds D’Ewes and ‘the Poitovin Cholick’: Persecution, Toleration, and the Mind of a Member of the Long Parliament,” Canadian Journal of History 38 (December 2003): 481–91. In footnote 12 there, the citation should be to BL Harl. MS 166, not 164. 120.  BL Harl. MS 166, fo. 194v. 121.  Ibid., fo. 195r. 122.  Ibid., fo. 182r. 123.  Ibid., fo. 195v. 124.  Ibid., fos. 202v–3r. Presumably, he also wanted an avenue of appeal to lay courts beyond the level of ministers and elders. 125.  On the distinction between the Melvillian and Erastian positions, see George S. Yule, Puritans in Politics: The Religious Legislation of the Long Parliament, 1640–1647 (Appleford, 1981), 160ff. 126.  BL Harl. MS 166, fo. 204r. 127.  Ibid., fo. 206r. 128.  Ibid., fo. 204r & v. 129.  Ibid., fo. 267v. 130.  Counter-Revolution: The Second Civil War and Its Origins, 1646–8 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 294, 296. Although Simonds was named to the tenth division of the classical presbytery of Suffolk in 1645, there is no evidence that he attended or took part in its deliberations. See W. A. Shaw, A History of the English Church during the Civil Wars and under the Commonwealth (London, 1900), 2:428. 131.  BL Harl. MS 166, fo. 214r. 132.  Ibid., MS 385, fo. 107. This is surprising in view of the fact that Damport was named to Wren’s commission for the enforcement of his liturgical policy in 1636. If Damport was an anti-Calvinist or an enthusiast for Wren’s program, he may have held his tongue about such matters in Stowlangtoft. Simonds would have been quick to notice even the slightest indication of them in his sermons. I am grateful to Ken Fincham for advice and information about Wren’s visitation and its aftermath. 133.  Autobiography, fo. 159v (2:103). 134.  Ibid., fo. 158v (2:98–99). 135.  BL Harl. MS 378, fo. 41. 136.  Ibid., fo. 44r. 137.  Ibid., MS 379, fo. 170.

Notes to Chapter 8 138.  Ibid., MS 483, fo. 20r. 139.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 19. 140.  See above, pp. 98–99. 141.  See Clive Holmes, ed., The Suffolk Committees for Scandalous Ministers 1644– 1646 (Suffolk Records Society, 1970), 13:13. For D’Ewes’s role in the complaint of the parishioners at Elmsett against George Carter, see ibid., 104ff. 142.  BL Harl. MS 387, fo. 45. The date of this letter is difficult to read and partly hidden in the binding, but may be February 27, 1643/44. It contains a hint that he was hoping his resignation at Stowlangtoft would strengthen the case for his retention of Feltwell. 143.  Ibid., MS 483, fos. 49v, 68v. 144.  Ibid., MS 378, fos. 69–70 (D’Ewes at Westminster to Damport, July 25, 1644). 145.  Ibid., MS 376, fo. 48. 146.  Ibid., MS 378, fo. 75. 147.  ODNB, s.v. “Gurnall, William.” The first part of the treatise appeared in 1655, the second in 1658, and the third in 1662. 148.  Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 318, 625. 149.  BL Add. MS 15520, fo. 59v. 150.  BL Harl. MS 483, fos. 75v–76r. 151.  Ibid., MS 376, fo. 92r. 152.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 9r & v. 153.  Ibid., fo. 94r. His remarks in this letter about rumors he had heard that the people in Sudbury were disappointed by his departure suggest that the notion that he had been Copinger’s curate is mistaken (unless a curacy in Lavenham had preceded his appointment at Sudbury). 154.  Ibid., MS 376, fo. 10v. 155.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 10r. 156.  Ibid., MS 483, fo.124r & v. For the Commons’ order that Simonds bring in an order for Gurnall’s appointment, see Commons Journal, December 7, 1644. In October 1648, Simonds intervened to help Gurnall decline a call to preach a fast-day sermon to Parliament because of his illness. Ibid., MS 376, fo. 98r. 157.  BL Harl. MS 379, fo. 135 (letter dated August 30, 1647). 158.  Ibid., MS 384, fo. 262r. 159.  Ibid., MS 593, fo. 20v. 160. Watson, 15. See pp. 13–15 for more details concerning D’Ewes’s purchasing and study of coins. 161.  BL Harl. MS 378, fo. 46r. 162.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 45r & v. 163.  Ibid., MS 483, fos. 134r, 137r, 139r, 170r. Young was back examining coins with him on March 24 and 28. 164.  Ibid., fo. 47v. 165.  Ibid., MS 6988, fo. 216. 166.  Ibid., MS 376, fo. 159. 167.  Ibid., MS 483, fos. 2v, 10v. They returned to Henry of Huntingdon in July, but it is not clear whether they were looking at the same manuscript or a different one (fo. 98r). 168.  Ibid., fos. 17r, 31v, 72r. 169.  Ibid., fo. 49r. 170.  Ibid., fo. 72r. 171.  Ibid., fos. 47r, 53r, 58v, 62v, 107v, 111v, 114r, 120r, 129v, 130r.

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Notes to Chapter 8 172.  Ibid., fo. 151r. On D’Ewes and Tacitus, see Salt, 285–87. 173.  Ibid., MS 484, fos. 143v, 149r. 174.  Ibid., fos. 146v, 148v. 175.  Ibid., fo. 157r. 176.  Ibid., fo. 49v. 177.  Ibid., MS 374, fo. 245. 178.  Ibid., MS 376, fo. 165. This was probably William Steward of Marham, Norfolk (admitted to Grey’s Inn, 1614), while John Brograve was admitted there in 1612. They were also contemporaries at Cambridge. Venn 1:224, 4:162. 179.  BL Harl. MS 381, fo. 151. 180.  Ibid., MS 374, fo. 295. On Edward III’s “Annus quadragesimus,” Hennings, and Unesuerus, see Watson, 143, 312–13. 181.  Ibid., MS 483, fos. 30r, 49r, 59r, 79r, 97r, 91v, 93r, 107r; MS 484, fos. 153r, 123v. 182. Coates, 173. See ibid., 5 n., for Coates’s informative footnote on Egmont. See Russell, FBM, 421–22, for his discussion of this remark and insight into the complexity of “anti-popery.” 183.  BL Harl. MS 378, fo. 23r. On December 30, 1645, de Laet’s letter included information about the D’Ewes heritage in the Low Countries. See ibid., MS 376, fo. 140. 184.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 217. 185.  Ibid., MS 483, fo. 3r. For Wheelock, see above, pp. 295–97. 186.  Ibid., MS 166, fo. 13v. My thanks to Jordan Downs for sending me an excerpt from a Royalist diary composed in Oxford for the week of January 22–30, 1644. The unknown author noted that “Sr Symond D’Euce” was in Parliament in London on Friday, January 26, but then appeared on Saturday in Oxford. But at the end of the document the writer stated that “the Newes of Sr Symen d’Euce is nothing for theire is noe such man in Oxf[ord].” The notion that he went to Oxford is probably either a case of mistaken identity or an effort at disinformation. Huntington Library HA Correspondence Box 18, #8060. See BL Harl. MS 165, fo. 284, for evidence that he was following his routine schedule of perfecting his journal early in the morning and attending parliamentary committee meetings later. 187.  BL Harl. MS 483, fo. 25r. 188.  Ibid., MS 166, fo. 209v. 189.  Ibid., MS 164, 311v. 190.  Ibid., MS 165, fos. 114v–15. 191.  Ibid., MS 166, fo. 78r. 192.  Ibid., MS 483, fos. 83r & v, 90r. 193.  Ibid., MS 166, fo. 100r (July 24, 1644). For Simonds’s vigorous defense of Charles Lewis against John Griffith’s charge that the Prince Elector had slept with the Lady Herbert at his house, see ibid., fo. 198v (April 5, 1645). 194.  Ibid., MS 483, fo. 133v. 195.  Ibid., MS 166, fos. 199v–200r. 196.  Ibid., fo. 207r. 197.  Ibid., MS 483, fos. 27v, 32r. 198.  Ibid., fos. 71v, 94r. Thomas was a younger son of Sir Martin Stuteville of Dalham, Suffolk, his frequent correspondent from 1624 until his death in 1631. 199.  Ibid., fos. 191r, 202r. 200.  Ibid., MS 484, fo. 37v. 201.  Ibid., MS 166, fo. 273r. 202.  Ibid., fos. 273v–74r. Peter Salt has shown that Sir Edward Dering’s defection from Oxford early in 1644 was influenced partly by Charles’s dealings with the Irish. See ODNB, s.v. “Dering, Edward.”

Notes to Chapter 8 203.  BL Harl. MS 484, fos. 145v, 152r, 156r. 204.  Ibid., fo. 152r. 205.  David Underdown, Pride’s Purge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 147–48. On Pride, a brewer before and after the civil wars who did well out of contracts to “victual” the navy with beer during the Interregnum, see ODNB, s.v. “Pride, Thomas.” 206.  BL Harl. MS 382, fo. 153r. 207.  Ibid., MS 383, fo. 215r. 208.  Ibid., MS 483, fo. 9v. Compare fos. 13v, 37r, 89v. 209.  Ibid., MS 382, fo. 150r. 210.  Ibid., fos. 126–29. 211.  Ibid., MS 484, fo. 157v. 212.  Ibid., fo. 156v. 213.  Ibid., fo. 151r. 214.  Ibid., MS 484, fo. 16r. 215.  Ibid., MS 387, fo. 109. At the end of the letter, she wrote: “I desire your worship I may heare from you how your children doe for they are uery deare to me.” Mary Page lived near Simonds’s sister Betty Poley at Boxted. 216.  Ibid., MS 483, fos. 54v–55r, 57r & v, 59r. 217.  Ibid., fos. 133v, 135v. 218.  Ibid., MS 378, fo. 95. The draft of his letter is dated December 13, 1645. I am indebted to Carol Pal for drawing my attention to it and for her translation of it. For her intriguing account of the Bathsua Makin-Van Schurman correspondence and Simonds’s role in it, see Pal’s Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 193ff. For a translation of Schurman’s letter to Simonds, see The Learned Maid (London, 1659), 47–50. 219.  The Saints Encouragement in Evil Times (1651), sig. (*4)r. The codicil to Simonds’s will described in footnote 224 below included a bequest of “one bed, pillow, neck-pillow, with bed-covering and coverlet” to Leigh. 220.  BL Harl. MS 387, fo. 6r. 221.  Ibid., MS 377, fo. 222v. 222.  Ibid., MS 374, fo. 295r. On “groaning cakes” and other food prepared for the celebration of a child’s birth, see Layinka Swinburne’s and Laura Mason’s essay (“‘She came from a groaning very cheerful . . .’: Food in Pregnancy, Childbirth and Christening Ritual”) in Food and the Rites of Passage (Totnes, Devon: Prospect Books, 2002), ch. 3. 223.  BL Harl. MS 385, fo. 150r. 224.  TNA PROB 11/212/835. To update provisions of the 1639 will, Simonds wrote this one in Latin after 1645 and added the codicil after Willoughby’s birth. Inserted in English is the explanation that because of “the dimness of his sight,” he was unable to sign the codicil he had just written. Three witnesses confirmed by their signatures that they “heard him declare that the sayd Codicill was . . . truely parte of his will.” The dowry enhancement was to be paid from his late brother’s property at Lavenham. 225.  BL Harl. MS 374, fo. 294. “Beda” is a reference to Abraham Wheelock’s edition of Bede. 226.  Ibid., fo. 297. 227.  On his burial, see Notes & Queries, 3d ser. (July 14, 1866): 10:33. On November 28, 1644, he had complained of a “rheum” in his left eye that prevented him from going the House, and two days later he wrote that his “eyesight was getting worse almost by the day, and my vision becoming increasingly obscured,

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Notes to Chapter 8 which occasioned me great discomfort and pain.” But he made no further such complaint, and there is no indication that his health was failing early in 1650. BL Harl. MS 483, fos. 118r, 119r. 228. Autobiography, 2:149. 229. Watson, 348. 230.  I am grateful to Justin Stephens for sending me copies of letters that show that Lady Denton was at Stow Hall in the early 1650s. She might have moved back there to help Elizabeth with the rearing of Willoughby before her second marriage. See Northamptonshire Record Office, Isham Manuscripts, IC 268, 273, 4320, 4323, 4324, 4330, 4334. 231.  John Burke, Extinct and Dormant Baronetcies of England, Ireland and Scotland, 2d. ed., 1844, 159–60. 232.  Complete Baronetage (1902), 2:103–4. See also Watson, 348. 233.  The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 20. 234.  BL Harl. MS. 379, fo. 96. 235.  Primitive Practise for Preserving Truth, sig. A3r–v. 236.  The English Civil Wars, 1640–1660 (London: Phoenix, 2009), 83. 237.  Marginal Prynne, 1600–1669 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 170. 238.  Coates, xli–xliv. 239.  On these matters, I have benefited greatly from conversations with Jason Peacey, David Como, Stephen Roberts, and Blair Worden. 240.  BL Harl. MS 374, fo. 281r. 241.  Ibid., fo. 282r.

Index

Abisens, 269 Abbott, George, archbishop of Canterbury, 80, 89, 300, 443n79 Adelheida, 62 advowson, 91, 92, 181, 262, 412, 465, 451 Aelfric, 295–97 Aeneas, king of Troy, 165 ague, 178, 274 Albanius, 360 Albigensians, 267 Albion, 166 Albury Lodge, Hertfordshire, 115, 118, 124, 130, 132, 135, 142, 163, 171–76, 179, 188, 191, 196, 201, 211, 256, 295, 346, 380, 429, 454n7, 472n65 Allington pedigree, 421 Alva, Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, duke of, 287 Albyn, Samuel, 74, 75, 449n112 Alwy, 219 Amboyna “massacre,” 157, 249, 471n40 America, 13, 156, 202, 242, 243, 260, 275, 280 Amersfoort, 155, 249 Ames, William, 121 Amsterdam, 65, 149, 155, 159, 419 Anabaptists, 32, 34, 41, 42, 120–22, 125, 126, 128, 129, 148, 150, 151, 162, 236, 239, 241, 244, 252, 259, 261, 266, 269, 270, 276, 300, 407 Andrewes, Lancelot, bishop, 78 Andrews, Captain, 401 Andrews, Nicholas, 359 Anne of Denmark, queen of England, 37, 57, 70

anti-Calvinism, 12, 14, 32, 120, 198, 239, 242, 243, 251, 269, 275, 451n162, 472n75, 488n132 Antichrist, 42, 124, 125, 138, 153, 239, 268, 338 Antinomianism, 280, 407 antiquarian, 1, 2, 7, 9, 14, 15, 45, 54, 57, 62, 68, 73, 160, 162, 212, 213, 217, 220, 233, 238, 297, 298, 415, 421, 431, 435, 440n19 Antoninus Pius, 419 Antwerp, 61, 63, 449n118, 459n113 Apelles, 193, 464n25 aphrodisiac, 220 apoplexy, 189 Arcadia, 90 Argenis, 108 Ariosto, 220 Aristotle, 41, 179 Armine, Sir William, MP, 384, 397 Arminianism, 12–14, 23, 34, 35, 55, 88, 125, 128, 150, 162, 258, 451n165, 456n48, 483n120 Arminius, 23 Arminius, Jacobus, 12, 32, 24, 82, 121, 122, 126–29, 143, 148, 236, 239, 255, 259, 270, 279, 300 Arms, Office of, 141, 228 Arundel, Thomas Howard, 14th earl of, 80, 86, 475n8 Ashdon, Essex, 117 Ashfield, John, 219, 453n205 Ashton, Robert, 411 Aston, Lady Ann, 375–76, 379–81, 425 Aston, Sir Arthur, 391 Aston, Sir Thomas, 375, 376, 379–80, 485n9

494

Index atheism, 19, 23, 24, 24, 33, 42, 78, 88, 97, 98, 120, 189, 221, 240, 252, 255, 261, 270, 272, 366, 396, 441n25 Augsburg, 238 Baal, 239, 339 Baals, Peter, 97, 101 Bacon, Sir Edmund, 227, 230, 231, 294 Bacon, Nathaniel, 475n13 Bagshaw, Edward, MP, 314, 316 Balcanquhall, Walter, 87 Baner, Johan (Bannier), 238 Banqueting Hall, Westminster, 46 Barclay, William, 108 Bargrave, Isaac, 87 Barnardiston, Dame Ann, 10, 36, 111– 16, 118, 173, 341 Barnardiston, Arthur, 113, 114, 177 Barnardiston, Giles, 114, 173, 285 Barnardiston, Sir Nathaniel, 3, 36, 42, 58, 84, 91, 94, 104, 112–14, 136, 143, 158, 175, 190, 197, 262, 290, 302, 304, 324, 452n190 Barnardiston, Sir Thomas, MP, 103, 112 Barnardiston pedigree, 421 Barrington, Lady, 236 Barrington, Sir Thomas, 402 barristers, 45, 51, 52 Baskerville, Dr., 179 Basset, Richard, 228, 233, 468n139 Basset family, 170, 228, 230, 231, 233, 234, 421, 468n139 Bastwick, John, Dr., 339, 356 Bath, Henry Bourchier, 6th earl of, 204, 236, 256, 307 Báthory, Sigismund, 246 Battyer, James, 256 Baylie, Lewis, bishop, 38 Baynton, Sir Edward, 322 Beale, Dr., 260 Beaton, David, cardinal, 272–73 Beccles, Suffolk, 290 Beeston, William, 75, 76, 83, 86, 447n92, 449n118 Belhous family, 170, 230, 228, 232 Bellarmine, Robert (cardinal), 88, 148, 266, 271, 451n167, 474n105 benchers, 45, 49–52, 58, 72, 190, 446n57 Bennet, Captain, 402 Bernhard, duke of Saxe-Weimar, 241, 243

Bertius, Petrus (Pieter de Bert), 32, 129, 456n47 Berwick, 216, 238, 365, 366, 383, 397, 486n53 Berwick, Pacification of, 216 Betts, Captain, 410 Bevan, Mr., 306 Beza, Theodore, 261, 265, 448n96 Bingham, Lady, 104, 105, 108 Bingham, Sir Richard, 104 Bishop, Sir Edward, 327 Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire, 175 bishops: impious, 12, 127–30, 269, 272–73, 299–300, 302, 305, 317, 319–20, 337–41, 348, 352, 354–55, 359, 407–8 (see also William Laud, Matthew Wren, Richard Corbet); good, 126–27, 267–69, 273, 299–300, 318 (see also James Ussher) Bishops’ Wars: first, 216; second, 257, 319 Black Book of the King’s Household, 328 Blackfriars, 115, 116, 118 Blandford, Dorset, 20, 21 blood-letting, 179, 215 Boadicia, 138 Bodin, Jean, 26, 41 Bodvel (or Bodvile), John, MP, 313 Bohemia, 37, 43, 69–71, 73, 124, 132, 134, 140, 142, 149, 240, 255, 256 Bokenham, Grace (née D’Ewes), 20, 76, 102, 116, 182, 198, 210, 214, 294, 380, 427 Bokenham, Wiseman (brother-in-law), 102, 171, 182–85, 195, 197, 469n148 Bokenham pedigree, 421 Boldero, Francis, 56, 75, 97, 98, 101, 102, 104, 446n49, 449n115 Bonaventure, 26 Bond, Dennis, MP, 393, 394, 486n67 bondmen, 289 Bordeaux, 213, 255 Boreel, Willem, 424 Borlase, John, 324 Borough, Sir John, 67, 447n90 Boston, Massachusetts, 244, 277, 270 Boswell, Sir William, 209, 232, 233, 299 Bourchier pedigree, 421 Bowes, Marie (née D’Ewes), 76, 102–3, 116, 131, 171, 202, 230, 277 Bowes, Paul, 9, 169

Index Bowes, Sir Thomas (brother-in-law), 102, 116, 171, 174, 183, 198, 202, 203, 211, 214, 230, 277–78, 416, 454n2 Boxted, Suffolk, 103, 200, 232, 429, 465n52, 491n215 Bramber, Sussex, 327 Braunau abbey, Bohemia, 256 Brazil, 161 Breda, sieges of, 75, 210, 214, 459n113 Breitenfield, 125, 161, 240 Brentwood, Essex, 343 Bressingham, Norfolk, 58 Breston, Derbyshire, 417 Bridewell, 294 Bridgeman, Orlando, MP, 359 Bright, Mr., 187 Brightman, Thomas, 121, 144, 153–55, 457n71, 458n79 Bristol, John Digby, 1st earl of, 84, 86, 450n149 Brograve, Hanna, 115, 118, 119, 130, 163, 171, 173, 178, 179, 188, 211, 337, 346, 350, 380, 382, 465n63 Brograve, John, 115, 420, 421, 429, 490n178 Brograve pedigree, 421 Brooke, Sir Richard, 284 Brooke, Robert Greville, 2d lord, 256, 276, 470n2 Browne, Edmund, 277–79, 474n120, 475n130 Brownists, 343 Brownrigg, Ralph, bishop, 352, 354, 416 Bruce, John, 3–5, 15, 61–65, 311, 371–72, 446n64 Bruen, Calvin, 316 Brunswick, duchy of, 124, 248 Brussels, 156, 157, 210, 216, 217 Brutus, 165–68 Buchanan, David, 419 Buckingham, George Villiers, 1st marquis and duke of, 8, 27, 28, 24, 140, 141, 190, 445n31, 450n149, 458n89, 459n102; and Charles I’s coronation, 79–81; and the parliaments of 1625 and 1626, 84–87; and the La Rochelle campaign, 132–37; and assassination, 143–49 Buckle, Mr., 356 Burges, Cornelius, 87, 305, 408, 416

Burghley, William Cecil, 1st baron, 156 Burrhus, 335 Burroughes, Jeremiah, 398 Burroughs, Sir John, 134, 135 Burton, Henry, 315, 356 Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, 15, 24, 28, 29, 42, 117, 136, 150, 175, 179, 182, 187, 189, 192, 196, 197, 199, 200, 219, 229, 232, 240, 248, 261, 263, 412, 442nn48, 58, 457nn6, 68, 463n4 Butts, Dr. Henry, 227 Byfield, Nicholas, 343, 481n72 Bygrave, John, 176 Byzantium, 239 Cadiz, 124, 146 Caesar, Julius, 25, 166, 168, 443n70 Caesar, Sir Julius, 152–55, 178 Calamy, Edmund, 196, 285, 412, 469– 70n163 Calvert, Sir George, 78 Calvin, Jean, 98, 121, 155, 255, 265, 455n12, 457n71, 470n24 Calvinism, 11, 23, 29, 32, 41, 68, 69, 72, 88, 94, 99, 123, 156, 168, 191, 215, 236, 243, 247, 253, 268, 299, 359, 424, 455n30 Cambridge, 3, 13, 29–43, 88, 147–48, 173, 192–95, 227, 247, 260, 295–96, 442n51, 452n188, 470n10, 476nn53, 5, 487n104 Cambyses, 321 Camden, William, 63, 236, 457n71 Cannon, John, 5 Capuchin monks, 394 Carew, Alexander, MP, 370 Carew pedigree, 421 Carleton, Sir Dudley, 145 Carlisle, James Hay, 1st earl of, 78 Cartwright, Edmund, 98, 99, 101, 121, 177, 413, 452n203 Casaubon, Isaac, 191, 464n19 Cassiodorus, 143, 144 Castellio, Sebastian, 129, 148, 259, 269, 276, 279, 296, 456n47 Castile, constable of, 77 Catholic League, 358 Chaderton, Laurence, 26, 27, 99, 442n39 Chaffin, Thomas, 87, 326, 327 Cham (Shem), 166 Chamberlain, John, 73

495

496

Index Chamberlain, Richard, 30–31, 119, 180–82, 225, 263, 345, 455n12 Chancery, Court of, 177 Chancery, Inns of, 49, 52 Chardstock, Dorset, 17, 440n1 Charles I (prince of Wales and king of England), 8, 9, 12, 14, 28, 53, 74, 116, 131, 136, 154, 156, 162, 186, 196, 227, 237, 254–55, 282, 293, 305, 313, 332, 326, 364, 366, 358, 418, 433–34, 451n159, 481n61, 490n202; Spanish marriage, 42, 69–70, 73, 75–79, 83–85, 88, 449n117; coronation ceremony, 79–81, D’Ewes’s changed opinion of, 81–82; La Rochelle debacle, 132–35; relations with the Dutch, 154, 156, 249, 426, 471n40; ship money levy, 254, 286, 388, 321; attempt on the Five Members, 355– 59, 363; religious views and policies of, 74–75, 249, 252, 337–38, 352, 374, 459n102. See also Buckingham, George Villiers; Henrietta Maria; Parliament of 1628; Buckingham, George Villiers Charles II, prince of Wales and king of England, 248, 358 Charles IX, king of France, 271, 273 Charles Lewis, Elector Palatine, 238, 246–50, 313, 356, 424, 490n193 Chastelyn family, 170, 233, 421 Chedwell, William, MP, 306 Christian IV, king of Denmark, 157, 158, 252, 253 Christina, queen of Sweden, 250 Chester, Hugo de Abrincis, count of, 233 Cicero, 25, 94, 155, 179, 424 Cirencester, Gloucestershire, 426 Clayton, Mr., 88 Clement, Jacques, 274 Clere, Lady Elizabeth, 293–94 Cleves, duke of, 60, 61 Clopton, Walter, 112, 171, 173, 246 Clopton, Sir William, 36, 103, 229, 231 Clopton pedigree, 421 Clotworthy, Sir John, MP, 312, 393, 394 Coates, Willson, 353, 433, 439n4, 490n182 Cogan, Robert, 191, 464n22 Coke, Sir Edward, MP and justice, 48, 81, 82, 90, 136, 256, 319, 446n56

Coke, Sir John, 256 Coke, Thomas, MP, 313 Colchester, Essex, 131, 230 Coligny, Gaspard de, admiral, 211, 212, 275, 358 Coloma, Don Carlos, 76 comet of 1618, 35 Committee of Both Kingdoms, 424 Committee of Forty-Seven (recess committee, 1641), 350, 351 Committee for Plundered Ministers, 414 Common Pleas, Court of, 52, 57, 67, 150, 175, 321, 340, 445n14, 464n16 Commyn, Francis, 256, 295, 297, 429, 472n65 Condé, prince of, 253 Coningsby, Thomas, 320 Constable, Sir William, 328 Constans, king of the Britons, 272 Constantine, 270 convulsion fits, 35, 36, 199–201, 204, 429, 465n73 Copinger, Ambrose, 182, 187, 188, 415, 463n5, 467n123, 489n153 Copinger, Henry, 415 Corbet, Richard, bishop, 198, 231, 261, 299 Cosin, John, 316, 349 Cotton, Sir Robert, 2, 8, 56, 80, 110, 123, 135, 142, 147, 174, 212, 290, 301, 356, 404, 449n117, 451n159, 467nn125, 126, 127; library of, 57, 58, 125, 126, 163, 167, 170, 171, 223, 236, 319, 446n52, 460nn138, 140; and the earldom of Oxford, 67, 68, 80, 85; death, 220–22 Cotton, Sir Thomas, 222, 223, 295, 297, 298 Cotton, Suffolk, 293–94 Covenanters, 218, 256, 257, 288, 292, 295, 332 Covent Garden, 300, 306, 375, 380, 428, 468n138 Coventry, Sir Thomas, 113, 114, 152, 178, 196, 321, 462n153 Coxden, Dorset, 1, 17–22, 25, 66, 176, 192, 441n13, 464n22 Crane, Sir Robert, MP, 304 Cranmer, Thomas, archbishop, 122 crapulosity, 272 Crashaw, William, 87

Index Croke, Sir George, justice, 190, 254, 285, 294, 475n16 Cromwell, Oliver, 11, 330, 331, 426, 482n93 Culpepper, Sir John, MP, 339, 349, 356, 365, 478n125 Curtein, Mr., 206 Cust, Richard, 332, 446n47, 448n108, 456nn55, 5, 481n61 Cyprian, 155 Dalham, Suffolk, 9, 58, 85, 109, 130, 132, 148, 149, 159, 171, 174, 175, 448n92, 449n131, 458n97 Damport, Richard, 15, 118, 181, 182, 184, 186, 187, 197, 198, 200, 24, 217, 231, 232, 234, 235, 258, 261, 343, 344, 409, 411–15, 463n300, 463n5, 467n112, 469nn162, 163, 481n67, 488n132, 489n144 Danegeld, 288–89 D’Arcy, Abigail, 430 D’Arcy, Conyers, 420 D’Arcy pedigree, 421 Darcy, Sir Francis, 376 Darcy, Sir Thomas, 432 Danes, 131, 135, 136, 149, 154, 161, 305, 357 Davenant, John, bishop, 32 Day, Martinus, 87 Dearlove, William, 327, 328, 480n11 Decius, 153 de Laet, Johannes, 1, 2, 9; correspondence with, 210, 297–99, 302, 380, 422, 477n69, 484n3, 490n183 de Medici, Catherine, queen of France, 273 de Medici, Marie, queen of France, 160 de Thou, Christophe, 251 de Thou, Jacques Auguste, 2, 34, 142, 211–13, 221, 229–30, 234, 251, 265, 271, 274–76, 287, 288, 339, 443n70, 445n38, 466n94, 468n144, 472n73, 473n92, 474nn107, 108 Dee, John, 163, 164 Delphic oracle, 194 Demosthenes, 39 Denton, Sir Anthony, 108 Denton, Elizabeth Lady (née Isham), 108–10, 113, 116, 135, 174, 176–79, 181, 183–85, 187–88, 191, 194–97,

207, 229, 234, 307, 347, 431, 454n238, 464n29, 477n100, 492n230 Dering, Sir Edward, 15–16, 232, 355, 440n19, 490n202 descents, 420–22 Desputine, Dr., 199, 200 D’Ewes, Adrian (great-grandfather), 5, 60–61, 65, 168, 223, 225, 447n84, 468n132 D’Ewes, Adrian (I, son), 196, 197 D’Ewes, Adrian (II, son), 204, 216, 217, 222, 282, 301, 477n79 D’Ewes, Anne (née Clopton), 10, 14, 36, 53, 118, 124, 130, 134–35, 170–75, 179, 184, 186–84, 190–92, 202, 210, 211, 217, 223, 230, 235, 239, 248, 282, 301, 306, 413, 428–29; marriage negotiation, 103, 110–16; pedigree, 233, 110–11, 170, 228, 233; pregnancies, 175–78, 188–89, 196– 98, 200, 204–5, 341; letters to her from Simonds at Westminster, 307, 314–15, 331, 336–37; death, 341–47 D’Ewes, Anne (daughter), 178, 188, 191, 234, 346 D’Ewes, Clopton (I, son), 188, 189 D’Ewes, Clopton (II, son), 198–204, 206, 258 D’Ewes, Elizabeth (sister). See Elizabeth Poley D’Ewes, Elizabeth (daughter), 341, 428–29 D’Ewes, Elizabeth (née Wilughby), 375–82, 385–85, 416–17, 427–31, 492n230 D’Ewes, Geerardt (son), 196, 197 D’Ewes, Geva (daughter), 204, 233, 234, 341 D’Ewes, Gheerardt (or Garrett, grandfather), 61, 63–6 D’Ewes, Grace (sister). See Grace Bokenham D’Ewes, Jone (Johanna, sister). See Jone Ellyott D’Ewes, Isolda (daughter), 204–5, 230, 341, 346, 3890, 429, 430, 432 D’Ewes, Marie (sister). See Marie Bowes D’Ewes, Mary (daughter of Simonds and Elizabeth), 430 D’Ewes, Paul (father), 10, 14, 18, 20, 22, 23, 30, 33, 36, 39, 43, 47, 48, 50, 51,

497

498

Index 59, 61–65, 69, 77, 84, 91, 92, 98, 99, 102–5, 110–14, 116, 117, 130–33, 135, 148, 170, 173–79, 187, 190, 197, 201, 219–20, 263, 283, 412, 415, 442nn38, 39, 444n89, 447n74, 452n188, 453nn204, 219, 221, 454nn225, 238, 456n57, 457n58, 459n101, 462nn189, 198, 463nn200, 5; his move to Stowlangtoft, 24, 25; his Puritanism, 26, 27, 29; his stinginess, 31, 46; his hotheaded and hasty moods, 43; his courtships, 105–10; his death, 179–85 D’Ewes, Paul (brother), 441n8 D’Ewes, Peter (cousin), 225 D’Ewes, Richard (brother), 1, 3, 8, 10, 43, 65, 76, 104, 176, 183–85, 187, 191, 198, 200, 223, 225, 230, 232, 237, 247– 48, 253–55, 257, 283–84, 306, 379–80, 384–85, 433, 452n183, 464nn25, 26, 27, 465n69, 466nn83, 92, 98, 467nn112, 113, 469n162, 471n37, 478n102, 484n138, 486n68; birth, 25; letter to father, 179; education, 192–96; travels, 205–18; effort to recruit Simonds to Royalism, 365– 67; charge he sired a bastard, 367; death and parliamentary aftermath, 390–93 D’Ewes, Sir Simonds, 1st baronet: — writings (dates indicate when a project was initiated): Philanax Patroleinos (1623), 77–78; “Indications of certainty in the matter of salvation” (1627), 97, 120–23, 125–28, 259, 263; Journals of the Elizabethan parliaments (1629), 168–70, 176–79, 447n70, 461n159; Lavenham speech (1634), 218–20; autobiography (1636), 1–2, 6, 9, 14, 17–18, 20, 30, 33–34, 37, 45, 54, 81–82, 258–59, 281, 289, 439n4; The Primitive Practice for Preserving Truth (begun 1636), 15, 244, 255, 257–58, 261, 263, 265, 268–75, 358, 405, 408, 411–12, 425, 432, 433, 473nn98, 99, 474nn114, 115, 488n119; treatise on idolatry (1636), 265–68 — writing projects (unfinished): apology for Queen Elizabeth I (1622), 54; history of Great Britain/ England (1623), 9, 59, 138, 162, 164–

71, 224, 233, 236, 287, 299, 473n91; rise of Pelagianism/Arminianism (1626), 162, 236; “Great Brittaines Strengh and Weakenes” (1628), 136–43, 162; “Survey of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire” (ca. 1631), 169, 229; “The Antiquity of the Municipal or Common Laws of the Realm before the Norman Conquest” (ca. 1631), 169; AngloSaxon dictionary (ca. 1631), 57, 171, 179, 225, 226, 232–33, 294–99, 301, 303, 314, 422; journal of the parliaments of Mary I (ca. 1631), 179, 226; “Defence or justification of the King of Swedens warre in Germanie” (1631), 226, 239; journal of the Long Parliament (1640), 308– 10, 313–14, 373–74, 396, 408, 425–26; catalog of Roman coins to 641 CE, 418–19 — youth: birth and childhood: 17–19; early education, 19–24; St. John’s College, Cambridge, 29–44; Middle Temple, 43–53; sports and recreations, 38–39; injuries and illnesses, 18–20, 35–36 — marriage negotiations: Anne Clopton, 102–15; Elizabeth Wilughby, 373–82 — titles of honor: knighthood (1626), 116–17; baronetcy (1641), 117, 342, 481n61 — grief at deaths of family members, 21, 30–31, 102, 179–89, 182, 188–89, 196–97, 198–204, 341–47, 390–93, 428–29 — stages of his Puritan spiritual development: 23–30, 32–33, 37–39, 41–42, 87–102, 118–30, 257–81, 428. See also Anabaptists; anti-Calvinism; Arminianism; Calvinism; idolatry; Pelagianism; popery — collector of manuscripts and books, 162–64, 169–70, 211–12, 217–24, 228–35, 451; provisions for library in his will, 222–24 — collector of coins, 9, 58, 163, 220, 222, 227, 228, 247, 257, 314, 417–19, 468n13, 489nn160, 136 — genealogist, 4–5, 58–67, 170–71, 224–34, 303, 420–22

Index — historian/antiquarian, 54–69, 162– 75, 190–91, 217–24, 235–36, 294–303, 306–8, 314, 417–23 — newshound, 22–23, 33–35, 42–43, 69–87, 130–62, 237–57, 314–16 — social life, 32–33, 43, 72–73, 75–76, 114–18, 171–79, 205, 234, 307, 427–28 — shrievalty of Suffolk, 14; appointment, 282–85; ship money, legality of, 34, 82, 254–56, 262–63, 285–89, 314, 316, 319–22, 467n123; ship money, collection of, 289–94, 303, 315, 320, 322, 335–36, 393 — D’Ewes, MP for Sudbury in the Long Parliament: election, 303–5, London lodgings, 305–6; a Walter Mitty? 309–12; debating ability, 312–13; love of precedents, 317–18, 348; idolatry vs. antiquities, 350; the “Incident” in Scotland, 350–51; the Irish Rebellion, 352–53; Grand Remonstrance, 353–55; Attempt on the Five Members, 355–59; women’s peace demonstration, 400 — D’Ewes on parliamentary privileges: elections, 324–28; speech, 328–30, 369–71; arrest, 319, 355–59 — D’Ewes on parliamentary procedure: for treason trials, 306–7, 321–22; for divisions, 326–27; communion table placement, 307; disciplinary sanctions on MPs, 327– 30, 369–71; debate clause by clause, 369 — D’Ewes on punishment of Caroline “evil counsellors”: bishops, 337–41; other clerics, 316, 326–27; judges, 320–21; sheriffs, 320; earl of Strafford, 335–37 — D’Ewes on religious issues: liturgical reforms, 348–50, 354–55, 360–61; church government, 318–19, 350, 352, 355 (see also bishops); 1640 canons and the Etcetera Oath, 317, 348, 352–54; other abuses of power by anti-Calvinist clerics, 318; the “wicked prelates” as the greatest enemies of peace, 383 — D’Ewes on constitutional issues: voting franchise, 306, 325–26, 348; electoral law reform, 325, 331; ship money, 320–21; other taxes, 332–33,

386, 400–403, 426; imprisonment for debt, 348; denial of arms to papists, 348; oaths, 403–6. See also Solemn League and Covenant — D’Ewes as defender of legitimate royal prerogatives, 316, 331–32, 348, 351, 353–54, 360, 364–68 — D’Ewes on the strategy for achieving a negotiated peace, 354– 55, 359–64, 374, 382, 385–90, 394, 396–400. See also fiery spirits — D’Ewes on the Scots: 318, 329–30, 334–35, 350–51; Scottish Presbyterian church order, 407–12 D’Ewes, Sir Simonds, 3d baronet (grandson), 6 D’Ewes, Sissilia (mother—née Symonds), 17, 18, 20, 22, 23, 25, 27, 30, 31, 43, 105, 107, 441n13, 442n38 D’Ewes, Sissilia (sister), 102 D’Ewes, Sissilia (daughter), 200, 204, 205, 346, 380, 429, 430, 432 D’Ewes, Sir Willoughby, 2d baronet (son), 430–32 Des Ewes, Adolphe, 62 Des Ewes, Gheerardt, lord of Kessel, 60 Des Ewes, Gheerardt, 60–1 Des Ewes, Lewis, 62 Des Ewes, Otho, 62 Dickenson, John, 28, 29, 42, 192, 442n48 Digby (Richard D’Ewes’s friend), 207 Digby, George, first lord, 426 Digges, Sir Dudley, 86, 451n159 Diocletian, 153, 166 Diodati, Charles, 215 Diodati, Giovanni, 215 Directory for Public Worship, 410, 412 Domesday Book, 2, 25, 165, 170, 192, 192, 219, 226, 228, 229, 419, 420, 421 Donne, John, 8, 75, 87 Dorchester, Dorset, 18, 19, 36 Dorchester, Dudley Carleton, 1st viscount, 145 Dorset, Edward Sackville, 4th earl of, 28, 452n178 Dort (Dordrecht), 149, 209 Dover Castle, 232 Downes, Andrew, 39, 41 Downes, Thomas, 234, 235, 346, 347, 442n48 Drake, Sir Francis, 44, 444n3 Draycott, Derbyshire, 416

499

500

Index Dublin, Ireland, 353 Duchesne, André, 212, 213, 216–18, 233, 234, 287, 295 Dugdale, Sir William, 297, 431, 434 Dunkirkers, 135, 245 Durham, 238, 256 Dutch Republic, 34, 42, 61, 64, 65, 68, 74, 75, 125, 131, 132, 135, 136, 140, 144, 149, 154–61, 202, 209–10, 237, 242, 244–47, 249, 252, 253, 258, 269, 276, 287, 302, 423, 424, 446n81, 449n118, 471nn31, 40. See also United Provinces Dyer, Sir James, 48, 421, 445n14 Dyer, Mary, 279, 280, 475n126 Edict of Restitution, 141 Edgehill, battle of, 372, 385 Edward I, king of England, 88, 230, 284, 28, 321, 333, 367, 420 Edward II, king of England, 226, 420 Edward III, king of England, 289, 306–7, 317, 331, 333, 337, 352, 387, 421, 490n180 Edward VI, king of England, 12, 241, 267, 270, 340 Edwards, Richard, 254, 284, 472n55 Egmont, Louis, count of, 60, 421–22, 490n182 Eighty Years’ War, 269, 287 Eliot, Sir John, MP, 86, 152, 328, 451n159, 459n106 Elizabeth I, queen of England, 12, 13, 17, 54, 76, 127, 128, 138, 139, 140, 156, 163, 169, 196, 262, 267, 268, 293, 326, 331, 337, 340, 341, 349, 369, 423–24, 461n140, 475n8, 482n85 Elizabeth, princess, queen of Bohemia, 23, 69, 70, 246–48, 250–52, 423, 471nn34, 37, 471n91 Ellyott, Jone (sister), 18, 20, 36, 47, 102, 106, 116, 168, 172, 182, 183, 199, 200, 207, 208, 285, 347, 390, 428, 444n8, 463n10 Ellyott, Sir William (brother-in-law), 47, 75, 76, 83, 102, 136, 142, 168, 172, 179, 183–85, 192, 237, 302, 341, 359, 428, 481n60 Elsyng, Henry, 269 Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 277, 443n84 Engaine pedigree, 421

epilepsy, 200, 201 Erle, Sir Walter, MP, 310, 312, 313, 325, 328, 329, 356 Essex riots, 383, 387, 481n36 Essex, Robert Devereux, 2d earl of, 33, 443n68, 457n71 Essex, Robert Devereux, 3d earl of, 247, 382–84, 386, 390, 397, 401, 449n118, 487nn87, 104 Etcetera Oath, 302, 314, 317, 386, 479n141 Eusebius, 155 Evangelists, 124, 351, 355, 365 Eynsham, Oxfordshire, 66 Exchequer Office, 25, 55, 67, 191, 226, 228, 229, 254, 312, 320, 391, 481n61 excise taxes, 402–3, 426 Fairfax, Sir Thomas, 395, 426, 427 Falkland, Lucius Cary, 2d viscount, 320 fasting, 118, 119, 124, 134, 136, 143, 146, 151, 173–75, 177, 178, 180, 188, 190, 192, 256–58, 263, 305, 371, 398, 428, 429, 462nn175, 188 Felton, John, 144–47, 458n89 Felton, Nicholas, bishop, 37, 93 Feltwell, Norfolk, 413 Femel, Agnes, 66 Femel, Richard, 66 Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor, 34, 37, 42, 69, 70, 73, 125, 131, 134, 135, 141, 142, 157, 158, 160, 161, 237, 238, 240, 243, 253 Ferdinand III, Holy Roman Emperor, 240 Fernando (Ferdinand) of Austria, cardinal-infante of Spain, 245 fever, 19, 190, 214, 215, 346, 397, 429 Fiennes, Nathaniel, MP, 328, 365, 367, 369, 370, 393, 483n131, 484n152 fiery spirits (violenti), 14, 150–51, 365– 72, 393–400 Finch of Fordwich, Sir John, 1st baron of, 315, 316, 320–22 Fincham, Ken, 263 Fitzherbert, judge, 219 Fitzwarren, Isolda, 230 Flanders, 210, 467n108 Fleet prison, London, 89, 100, 241, 453n209 Fleet Street, London, 366 Fleetwood, Sir Miles, 317

Index Fleta, 57, 170, 178, 179 Fletcher, Phineas, 376 Flood (Cotton’s assistant), 221, 222, 467n126 Florence, 214–16, 399 Florus, 41 fluxion, 199–201 football, 38, 443n80 Forced Loan of 1626, 34, 132, 456nn55, 56 Fordham, Cambridgeshire, 173 Foxe, John, 260, 434 France, 34, 75, 125, 126, 131, 134, 136, 137, 140–42, 148, 157, 158, 160, 161, 174, 185, 206, 208, 212, 214, 216, 228, 230, 237, 239, 240, 245, 246, 250–54, 265, 271–74, 314, 318, 357, 358, 287, 398, 460n135, 466n92 Franche-Comté, 208 Frederick Henry, prince of Orange, 155, 156, 210, 245, 247, 426 Frederick V, Elector Palatine, 37, 42, 69–71, 82, 124, 134, 247, 256, 448n100 Friar, Sir Thomas, 145 Frodo, 219 Fronto, 54 Fulvius Ursinus, 419 Gadarene swine, 26 Galba, 298 Garnet, Henry, 269 Gaston, duke of Orléans, 253–54 Gawdy, Sir Framlingham, MP, 309, 310, 317, 479n142 Gelderland, 4–5, 60, 64–65, 67, 110, 155, 176, 209, 223–24, 232, 419, 421–22, 446n81 Gell, Sir John, 382 Gellius, 54 Genealogy, 10, 59, 178, 216, 259, 420, 473n87 Geneva, 213–16, 448n96, 455n12, 466n107, 467n108, 468n144 Geoffrey of Monmouth, bishop, 165– 67, 271, 272, 416n149 Gerard, Sir Gilbert, 327, 386, 480n11 Germanicus, 23 Germanus of Auxerre, bishop, 126, 127, 272, 455–56n36 Germany, 125, 141, 151, 238, 243 Geva de Abrincis, 233

Gibson, Abraham, 24, 27, 36, 42, 43, 93–97, 104, 110, 112, 121, 441n28 Giffard, Dr., 27 Gifford, George, 27 Gildas, 12, 127, 163, 360 Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales), 165, 166, 456n37, 461n149 Glover, John, 235 Glyn, John, MP, 310, 317, 368, 384, 385, 393, 483n131, 486n67 Goad, Thomas, 87 Goat’s Alley, London, 305, 306, 477n100 Godalming, Surrey, 47, 359 Gogmagog, 165 Gondomar, Don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, count of, 74, 76, 89 good papists, 2 Goring, Sir George, 210, 308, 371 Gorongonus, king of Kent, 272 Gouge, William, 87 Grand Remonstrance (1641), 353–55, 369 Gray’s Inn, London, 420, 444n4 Great Stanway church, 230 Great Thornham Hall, 102, 116, 171, 353 Green, Ian, 415 Green, John, 265 Green Dragon Inn, London, 306 Greenwich, 152, 361, 459n105 Gregory of Naziansen, 26 Gregory I, Pope, 12, 127 Gregory XV, pope, 75 Grimston, Sir Harbottle, MP, 384 Grocers’ Hall, London, 360 Guise, Henry, duke of, 273, 274 Gurdon, Brampton, 175 Gurdon, John, MP, 392–94, 398, 483n131, 486nn67, 69 Gurnall, William, 24, 415–16, 433, 489nn147, 156 Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden, 125, 149, 159–62, 178, 238–41, 249– 50, 253, 456n45, 460nn129, 135 Hague, The, 124, 132, 209, 212, 248, 249, 251, 299, 322, 423, 471n37 Halliwell, James Orchard, 2, 3, 18, 27–28, 30, 439n4, 441n4, 445n38, 446n64, 448n100, 452n190, 462n174, 465n42, 469n147, 472n73, 477n72

501

502

Index Hammond, William, 242 Hampden, Sir John, MP, 254, 289, 320, 322, 235, 328, 240, 241, 256, 289, 393 Harrison, John, 58, 227, 446n58 Harvey, Sir William, 8 hats, etiquette of, 3–4, 44, 51, 104, 321, 322, 370, 384 Heinsius, Daniel, 418, 476n60 Helvetian (Helvetic) Confession, 34, 128, 249, 252, 255, 268, 270, 271, 279, 455n12, 473n99 Hengest, 272 Hennings, Hieronymus, 421 Henrietta Maria, queen of England, 8, 69, 79, 81, 94, 394, 396, 423, 426 Henry I, king of England, 57, 228, 230, 233, 468n139, 448n112, 475n15 Henry II, king of England, 232, 289, 387, 420, 454n1 Henry II, king of France, 273 Henry III, king of England, 228, 230– 32, 287, 420 Henry III, king of France, 140, 230, 251, 252, 274, 287, 289, 386 Henry IV, king of France, 23, 140, 157, 230, 245, 250, 251, 269, 271, 274, 287, 288, 358, 366, 387, 448n96, 474nn108, 114, 476n28 Henry VIII, king of England, 5, 61, 138, 153, 224 Henry Frederick, Palatine prince, 149, 248 Henry, Prince of Wales, 22, 23, 25, 33, 69, 140, 241, 288 Henry of Huntingdon, 153, 154, 166, 168, 171, 419, 455n3, 489n167 Herbert, Edward, attorney general, 356, 365 Herbert, George, 8, 32 Herodotus, 41, 284, 312 Hervey, Justice, 175 Hesilrige, Sir Arthur, MP, 356 Heyn, Piet, 149 Hexter, Jack, 5, 393 High Commission, Court of, 132, 198, 252, 316 Highgate, Middlesex, 177 Hilarius, 155 Hildesheim, Saxony, 132 Hilgay, Norfolk, 376 Hill, Roger, MP, 357 Historia Brittonum, 126

Hobbes, Thomas, 168 Hoby, Peregrine, 324 Holdsworth, Richard, 29–30, 32, 25–26, 41, 43, 47, 91, 93, 352, 354, 442nn50, 51, 443nn60, 84, 477n72, 482n93 Holland, 34, 158, 175, 209, 245, 259, 422 Holland, Cornelius, MP, 393, 406, 486n67 Holland, Henry Rich, 1st earl of, 227, 374, 395 Holland, Sir John, MP, 317, 479n128 Holland, Sir Thomas, MP, 58, 75, 449n117 Holles, Denzil, MP, 310, 328, 330, 340, 356, 357, 365, 369, 370, 373, 385, 389, 393–95, 483n131 Holles, Gervase, MP, 329–30 Holstein, 157 Hoo pedigree, 421 Hopton, Sir Ralph, MP, 360, 361 Horace, 41 Hornby Castle, Yorkshire, 420 Horne, Gustav, 241 Horne, earl of, 60 Hornigold, James, 305, 342–47, 477– 78n100 Horsa, 272 Hotham, Sir John, MP, 312, 343, 364 Hradschin Palace, 69 Hubbard, Mr., 29 Huguenots, 124, 125, 133–36, 140, 143, 144, 148, 157, 160, 191, 211, 237, 279, 245, 252, 255, 273, 275, 358, 445n38, 448n96, 473n99 Hull, Yorkshire, 363–64, 368 Humphrie, John, 192 Hungate, Sir Henry, 146 Hunston, Suffolk, 119, 180, 200, 204, 452n288 Hutton, Sir Richard, justice, 254, 285 Hus, Jan, 134 Hutchinson, Anne, 279–80 Hyde, Sir Edward, MP, 4, 334, 339, 351–52, 354–55, 365, 391 Hyde, Sir Laurence, 190, 464n15 Hyde, Sir Nicholas, justice, 189, 190, 464n16, 475n16 Hynde, Grace, 63, 446n79 idolatry, 12, 28, 122, 124–26, 258, 263, 265–68, 270, 296, 301, 37, 318, 339, 350, 355, 383, 423, 434

Index Independents, 395, 406, 411, 426–27 Indians (of America), 275, 286, 287 Infanta Maria of Spain, 70, 76 Innocent X, pope, 426 Inner Temple, 44, 72, 208, 254, 284, 373, 444n4 Inns of Court, 8, 44, 49–52, 58, 72, 190, 446n57 Ipswich, Massachusetts, 277 Ipswich, Suffolk, 89, 96, 262, 277, 290, 392, 457n68 Irby, Sir Anthony, 406 Ireland, 142, 300, 301, 307, 335, 350, 352–54, 361, 362, 363, 365, 367, 387, 396, 400, 420, 426, 490n202 Irish Rebellion (1641), 352–53, 361, 265, 387, 400, 426, 490n202 Isabella (of Austria, governor-general of the southern Netherlands), 156 Isham, Sir John, 109, 133 Isham, Justinian, 458–59n101 Isham, Sir Thomas, 109 Isle of Wight, 184, 415 Isleham, Cambridgeshire, 240 Islington, Middlesex, 117, 130, 131, 158, 16, 170, 175–79, 180, 188, 190–92, 195, 196, 226, 227, 462n189 Italy, 1, 131, 140, 157, 159, 161, 167, 185, 214, 215, 259, 265, 298 Ixworth, 198, 204, 234, 235, 268, 473n97 Ixworth Abbey, 197, 198, 307, 315, 341, 342, 347, 431 James I, king of England, 8, 12, 14, 22, 27, 27, 28, 34, 37, 42, 52, 54, 57, 69– 72, 74–76, 78, 79, 81–86, 88–91, 94, 127, 140, 142, 267, 269, 270, 276, 288, 293, 334, 349, 367, 441n28, 444n2, 445n3, 448n112, 449n117, 450n141, 453n206, 460n138, 484n141 James V, king of Scotland, 272 James, Richard, 221 Janson, Jan, sculptor, 40 Japhet, 165 Jefferay, John, 37, 39, 47, 76, 91, 443n79, 452n188 Jermyn, Sir Thomas, comptroller of the household, MP, 310 Jesuits, 2, 23, 29, 32, 34, 88, 122, 129, 136, 141, 142, 148, 149, 160, 214, 215, 252, 258, 261, 264, 269–71, 274, 312, 338, 363, 422

Jewel, John, bishop, 38, 89 Jews, 128, 164, 256, 301 Joachimi, Albert, xix, 1, 2, 9, 68–69, 118, 131–32, 135, 138, 143, 159, 160, 175, 286; correspondence with, 128–29, 136, 141, 143, 147, 149, 154–60, 171, 174, 188–91, 199–201, 204, 206, 208, 212, 234, 239–46, 249, 254–55, 257, 259, 265, 275, 279–80, 282, 284, 287, 305, 345, 462n193, 465n69, 470n18, 471nn36, 38, 40, 474n120, 477n79; visits with, 131–32, 158–59, 171, 174, 177, 179, 307, 373; and the Long Parliament, 424 Joel, 152, 154, 459n107 John I, king of England, 230, 287; chart rolls, 170; plea rolls, 171 Johnson, John, 234, 302 Joscelyn, John, 233, 298 Journals of all the Parliaments during the Reign of Elizabeth I, 9, 169, 226, 461n159 Jutland, 157 Juxon, William, bishop, 411 Kediton, Suffolk (now Kedington), 24, 36, 43, 58, 84, 94, 97, 104, 114, 121, 143, 171, 232, 452n190 Keilway, Robert, 49, 50 Kentwell Manor (Lutons Hall), Suffolk, 110–11, 453n212 Keonigsberger, H. G., 69 Kessel, Gelderland, 60, 61, 65, 446n64 King’s Bench, Court of, 52, 147, 189, 190, 306, 464n30 King’s College, Cambridge, 173, 451n167, 462n174 Knaresborough, Yorkshire, 327, 480n11 King’s Lynn, Norfolk, 420 Knowles, John, 192, 464n23 Knox, John, 128, 255, 419, 420 Knyvett, Sir Thomas, 230, 464n30 Knyvett family, 170, 232, 421 Kyle, Chris, 329 La Rochelle, France, 124, 133, 134, 144, 148, 168, 212, 252 Ladislas, king of Poland, 244 Lake, Peter, 94 Lambarde, William, 165–67, 219 Lambeth, 355 Lamont, William, 431

503

504

Index Langport, Northamptonshire, 109 Lapthorne, Mr., 89 Lathum, Alice, 64, 170, 171, 225 Lathum, Charles, 200 Lathum, William, 64 Laud, William, archbishop, 12–14, 53, 241, 249, 258, 260–69, 299, 302, 315, 316, 323, 335–39, 351, 412, 164n23, 467n125, 472n75, 473n81, 481n51 Laurence, Thomas, 249–50, 471n44 Lavenham, Suffolk, 15, 21–24, 91, 103, 117, 182, 187, 188, 190, 192, 196, 197, 200, 203, 218, 219, 264, 277, 412, 415, 417, 447n91, 453n212, 463n5, 467n123, 489n153, 491n224 Lawford Hall, Essex, 104, 108, 453n215 Leicester, 383 Leicester, Robert Dudley, 1st earl of, 164 Leicester, Robert Sidney, 2d earl of, 216 Leigh, Sir Edward, MP, 427, 429–30, 491n219 Lennox, Esmé Stuart, 3d duke of, 28 Lenthall, William, MP and speaker of the House of Commons, 330, 348, 357, 365, 383, 384, 484n2 Leslie, Alexander, 257, 295 Letam, Edward, 292 Levellers, 15, 411 Lichfield, Staffordshire, 379 Lincoln’s Inn, London, 82, 398, 444n4, 452n179 Lines, Will, 235 L’Isle, William, 225, 233 Littleton, Edward, lord keeper, 290, 397, 486n53 Lollards, 339 Long, Sir Walter, 152, 393, 401, 406 Long Melford, Suffolk, 170, 172, 205 Louis XIII, king of France, 34, 125, 133, 136, 141, 144, 148, 157, 161, 237, 243, 245, 249, 252, 287, 358, 394, 449n113, 460n127, 466n94 Lovelace family, 66 Lovering, John, 277 Lowry, John, MP, 312 Lucas, Sir John, 230, 485n36 Lucy, William, 88 Lumber Street, London, 211 Lupus of Troyes, bishop, 128, 455– 56n36

Luther, Martin, 23, 34, 88, 128, 129, 162, 267, 270, 279, 444n88, 470n24 Lutons Hall. See Kentwell Manor Lutter, battle of, 124, 131, 252, 456n52 Lützen, battle of, 240 Maas, 209, 446n64 mace, 4 Magna Carta, 137 Magdeburg, 246 Maitland, F. W., 58, 446n56 Makin, Bathsua (née Reynolds), 24, 54, 441n29 Malaker, Christopher, 22, 23 Maldon, Essex, 27 Malta, 215, 392 Manchester, Edward Montagu, 2d earl of, 356, 397 Mandeville, Edward Montagu, viscount. See Manchester, 2d earl of Mansfeld, Count Ernest, 85, 134 Mantua, 131, 143, 149, 156, 158 Marchand, Mr., 213 Marcus Aurelius, 419 Market Weston, Suffolk, 265 Marlow, Buckinghamshire, 306, 324, 325 Marmion, barony of, 303 Marshall, Stephen, 305, 340, 398, 409, 415, 416, 428, 481n56 Martin, Mr. Richard, 321 Mary I, queen of England, 128, 138, 142, 226, 260, 271, 318 Mary Stuart (queen of Scots), 272 Massachusetts, 9, 65, 130, 242–44, 258, 277–81. See also New England Massiliensis, Salvianus, 168 Masters, Thomas, 72, 81, 87, 89–91, 110 Matthias, Holy Roman Emperor, 256 Maud, daughter of Arnulph of Friesland, 62 Maurice of Nassau, 245, 75–76, 245, 449n118 Maximilian, duke of Bavaria, 71, 246, 448n100 Mayerne, Sir Theodore, 69, 191, 199, 201, 470n18 Maynard, Lady, 304 Maynard, John, MP, 304, 306, 324, 325, 326, 389 measles, 19, 174, 176

Index Mede, Joseph, 68, 73, 85, 131, 149, 159, 242, 446n92, 450n155, 458nn79, 97 Meschech, 166 Messina, 215 Mexico, 129, 142 Micklethwaite, Paul, 91–93, 452n180 midwives, 18 Middle Temple, 14, 26, 58, 68, 72, 73, 76, 79, 80, 83, 92, 94, 97, 99, 104, 105, 110, 113, 125, 130, 135, 149, 152, 162, 163, 164, 174, 190, 305, 326, 411, 444nn86, 3, 4, 446n57, 451n177, 452n188, 477n99; Simonds at, 40, 41, 44–53, 56; brother Richard at, 192, 195, 200, 206, 208, 209; Middle Temple lawyers, 306, 391 Milan, 214, 215 Mildmay, Sir Henry, MP, master of the Jewel House, 332, 386, 404, 406 Millstone, Noah, 9, 468n127 Mirroir aux Justices, 57, 446n56 Mohammedans, 35, 286, 287, 301 Montague, Sir Henry, chief justice of King’s Bench, 82 Montague, James, bishop, 300, 443n79 Montague, Richard, bishop, 339, 460n131, 471n44 Montaigne, George, bishop, 87 Montanus, 266 Montaubon, 160 Montmorency family, 228 Montpellier, 213 Montpensier, duchess of, 274 Moore, Sir John, MP, 309, 312, 313, 317, 340, 484n2 Moore, Marmaduke, 283–84 Moreton pedigree, 421 Mornay, Philip, 168 Morrill, John, 11, 309, 310, 352, 440n27 Morton, Thomas, bishop, 267 Moses, 165 Moundeford, Sir Edmund, 276, 277, 474n119 Much Bromley, Essex, 102, 171, 202, 230, 454n2 Nantes, Edict of, 144, 445n38 Naomi, 201 Neile, Richard (archbishop of York), 14, 467n105 Nennius, 12, 12, 126, 127, 136, 153, 163, 166–68, 301, 360

Neo-Pelagianism. See Pelagianism Nero, 335 Nesie, Mr., 306 Neve, William, 228 New England, 1, 13, 65, 159, 237, 242, 244–45, 275–81, 433, 464n23. See also Massachusetts New Model Army, 395, 427, 434 Newburn, 303 Newenham Hall, Essex, 117, 173, 192 Newmarket, Suffolk, 227, 238, 246, 250 news, 25, 38, 42, 45, 69–79, 82–89, 118, 130–62, 206–9, 215–16, 237–60, 302–5, 353, 361, 373, 381, 382, 434, 448nn108, 112, 458nn79, 97, 460n129, 471n31, 484n3 newsletters, 73, 74, 131, 137, 238, 448n108, 449n131, 458n97, 460n2 Newton, Sir Henry, 205, 366, 392 Nicaragua, 277 Nicoll, Anthony, MP, 308 Nijmegen, Gelderland, 419 Noah, 164, 165 Nördlingen, 241–43 Norman Conquest, 9, 55, 153, 162, 164, 165, 259 North, Dudley, 3rd baron, 179 Northampton, James, “Lord Compton” and later 3d earl of, 123 Northampton, Spencer Compton, 2d earl of, 123 Northcote, Sir John, MP, 328 Northumberland, Algernon Percy, 10th earl of, 316, 394, 487n78 Norton, Suffolk, 98, 99 Nottingham, Northamptonshire, 379, 381, 383 Novell, John, 243, 258, 263–64, 268 novellor, 130–32, 162 Noy, William, 241, 459nn102, 106 Oaths, 76–78, 220, 267, 306, 387–87, 404–6. See also Etcetera Oath; Solemn League and Covenant Ochino, Bernardino, 259 Ogle, Lady Dorothy, 99–101 Ogle, Sir Richard, 100, 453n206 Old Palace Yard, Westminster, 305, 306, 400, 477–8n100 Oldisworth, Michael, 326 Onge, Thomas, 235, 469n163 Ordericus (Orderic Vitalis), 213, 229

505

506

Index Origen, 26, 191 Orleans, France, 206, 212, 213, 216, 271, 467n108 Otho, 298 Overbury, Sir Thomas, 27 Overton, Richard, 15, 411, 433, 473n98 Ovid, 25, 78 Oxford, 13, 45, 79, 301, 374, 387, 394, 398, 410, 451n165, 483n120, 490nn184, 202 Oxford, Aubrey de Vere, 1st earl of, 219 Oxford, Edward, earl of, 219 Oxford, Robert de Vere, 19th earl of, 67, 68, 80 Oxford, Robert Harley, 1st earl of, 6, 432 Oxford Treaty, 374, 388, 390, 397 Page, Mary, 204, 205, 235, 239, 429, 465n65, 491n215 Painted Chamber, Westminster, 75, 382, 397 Pakenham, 68, 457n66 Palatinate, 37, 69, 70, 79, 81, 84, 85, 124, 140, 210, 246, 249, 252 Palmer, Geoffrey, 355 Palmer, William, 196, 464n30 Paris, 23, 79, 160, 206, 211–14, 216, 218, 233, 238, 251, 253, 283, 287, 466n94, 467nn108, 113 Parker, Henry, 369 Parker, Matthew, archbishop, 233 Parker, Sir Philip, 302, 338, 369, 406 Parkhurst, John, bishop, 267–68 Parliament, 6, 10, 11, 13–15, 58, 74, 137, 156, 186, 252, 281, 286, 288–92, 450n155, 478n119 Parliament, Long, 3, 5, 14, 15, 164, 283, 301–41, 348–74, 382–412, 420, 422–27, 479n131, 486n53 Parliament, Short, 282, 283, 290, 294, 341 Parliament (of the Middle Temple), 45 Parliament of 1621, 54, 79, 81–83, 450n141 Parliament of 1624, 68, 73, 75, 83–85, 89, 450n146, 464n15 Parliament of 1625, 79, 85 Parliament of 1626, 81, 86, 87, 132, 450n149 Parliament of 1628, 14, 135–37, 146, 147–45, 174, 259, 459n102, 487n104

Parliament stairs, 80, 477n100 Parma, Alessandro Farnese, duke of, 245 Parry, Sir William, 317 Patroleinos, Philanax, 77, 78 Paul’s Cross, 88, 91 Pausanias, 284 Peard, George, MP, 317, 322, 363 Peasants’ War, 387 Pelagianism, 12, 35, 88, 125, 128, 129, 136, 163, 258, 270, 280, 432 Pelagius (“Morgan”), 12, 32, 126–29, 237, 244, 259, 269, 300, 483n120 Pell Office, 226 Pembroke, Philip Herbert, 4th earl of, 291, 293, 303, 304, 326, 327, 475n8, 476nn37, 40 Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, 37, 47 Penington, Isaac, MP, 318, 339 Perambulation of Kent (Lambarde), 165 Percy, Henry, 332 Perkins, William, 98, 121, 441n25, 46n13 Persians, 35, 215, 239, 284, 286, 287, 321 Peru, 129, 142 Perugia, 214 Peterborough, 316 Petition of Right, 137, 320 Peyton, Sir Anthony, MP, 357 Peyton, Sir Edward, 226–27, 240 Peyton, Sir Thomas, MP, 4, 309–11 Peyton pedigree, 421 Philip II, king of Spain, 64, 138, 142, 164, 245, 271 Philip III, king of Spain, 89 Philip IV, king of Spain, 76, 245 Pictavia of Valence, 273 Picts, 272, 276 Pimme, John, 416 Pinchbeck, John, 187, 463n5 Pipwell Abbey, Northamptonshire, 171, 177, 225, 226 Plato, 179 Playters, Sir William, 290 Pleydell, William, MP, 340 Plymouth, 133 Po, Captain, 401 poison, 27, 86, 128, 129, 273, 352, 450n141, 483n120 Poitovin colic, 274–75 Poland, 125, 158, 161, 242–44 Poley, Elizabeth (sister “Betty”), 103,

Index 116, 180, 183, 200, 206, 207, 208, 247, 429, 491n215 Poley, Sir John, 447n81, 456n52 Poley, Sir William (brother-in-law), 103, 185, 200, 207–9, 232, 237, 238, 256, 257, 291, 421, 429, 465nn52, 73, 469n151 Poley pedigree, 421 Pont de la Gard, Johan, 238 popery, 23, 88, 94, 129, 250, 318, 355, 361, 392, 398, 403, 409, 434, 482n85, 490n182 Portsmouth, 144, 147, 148, 148, 371, 449n115 Pory, John, 73, 458n97 Potts, Sir John, MP, 373–75, 377, 378, 381, 485n10 Prague, 69, 70, 71, 133, 448n100 Prayer Book Rebellion in Scotland, 216, 253, 254, 255–57 Prerogative Court of Canterbury, 183, 195 Presbyterian church order. See Westminster Assembly of Divines Preston, John, 122, 177, 452n179 Preston, Suffolk, 62, 264, 415 Prideaux, John, 121 Pride, Col. Thomas, 427 Pride’s Purge, 15, 423, 426–27, 429, 434 Prince, Lady Mary, 106–8 Prise, Sir John, 167 Privileges, Committee of, 304, 324, 327 privileges, parliamentary, 316, 324–32, 356, 357, 359, 360, 363, 434 Prometheus, 305 Providence Island, 276–77 Pryduide, 167, 461n149 Prynne, William, 241, 315, 356 Pseudo-Lutherans, 34, 120, 124, 129, 162, 236, 244, 261, 266, 270, 279, 300, 305, 338, 474n104 Purchas, Samuel, 87 Puritan, 26–27, 42, 74, 93–99, 118–30, 177, 181, 193–95, 257–81, 316–19, 340–41, 344–46, 376, 407–51, 433, 452n80, 472n55 Puritanism, 2, 10–14, 42, 74, 94, 195, 249, 252, 274 Putney debates, 306 Puttock, Roger, 353 Pym, John, MP, 5, 247, 252, 277, 310, 317, 328, 330, 340, 341, 348–51, 355–

58, 362–64, 371, 355, 356, 389, 393, 396–400, 402–5, 448n96, 458n100, 478n120, 481n56, 486n70 Quidenham, Norfolk, 58 Raby, Anne, 346 Rainsborough, Thomas, 306 Ralegh, Dr. Walter, 361 Ramsey Abbey, 231 Ramsey, Essex, 230 Ramsey, William, 63 Ravaillac, François, 23, 144, 269 Ravenscroft, Alice, 63, 225 Rayleigh, Essex, 230 Reading, Berkshire, 387, 390–91 Red Lion Inn (Blandford, Dorset), 20, 21 Reede, John, 424 Reydon Hall, 230 Reynolds, Bathshuah. See Bathsua Makin Reynolds, Edward, bishop, 416 Reynolds, Henry, 11, 24 Rhé, Isle of, 124, 133–35. See also La Rochelle Richard II, king of England, 313 Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis, cardinal duke of, 141, 144, 160, 206, 208, 237, 245, 358, 465n76 rickets, 199, 200 Riddel, Galfrid, 233 Rigby, Alexander, MP, 367, 394, 483n131 Risley, Derbyshire, 375–81 Rochester, Kent, 166 Roe, Sir Thomas, 161, 247, 460n135 Rome, 44, 54, 126, 164, 214, 216, 258, 288, 295, 353, 355, 361, 387 Ronwein, 272 Root and Branch Petition and bill, 293, 311, 315, 318, 337, 339, 480n24 Rose (Cambridge pub), 194 Rosendael, 75 Rous, Francis, MP, 317, 393, 451n167, 458n100, 486n70 Rudyard, Sir Benjamin, 351 Rupert, prince, 250, 383 Russell, Conrad, 5, 327, 339, 374, 432, 451n159, 478n119, 482n91, 483n132, 491n182 Ryece, Robert, 62, 264, 265, 415, 486n68

507

508

Index Sabbatarianism, 29, 37, 45, 72, 77, 78, 87–89, 94, 122–23, 178–79, 296–97, 428 St. Andrew Undershaft, London, 117 St. Anselm, 87 St. Augustine (“Austin,” archbishop of Canterbury), 26, 29, 300, 474n105 St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo, 12, 127, 130, 420 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 211, 273, 274, 358 St. Catharine’s Hall, Cambridge, 192, 194, 46n23 St. Dubricius (Dyfrig), bishop, 127 St. Faith’s church, London, 87, 100, 116 St. Germain, Paris, 206 St. George, Sir Henry, 162 St. George, Sir Richard, 66 St. George, Stowlangtoft, Suffolk, 30, 91–93, 102, 180–82, 187, 198, 201, 237, 258, 263–64, 268, 275, 409, 412, 414, 415, 457, 431, 452n188, 463nn200, 3, 4, 464n38, 486n67, 489n142 St. John, Oliver, MP, solicitor general, 221, 222, 306, 307, 310, 320, 321, 333, 386 St. John’s College, Cambridge, 29, 30, 32–43, 75, 194, 260, 441n28, 443n80, 470n10 St. Laurence, Upminster, 65–66, 447n84 St. Margaret’s, Westminster, 305, 371, 406, 411, 416, 428 St. Mary Axe, London, 24 St. Mary Woolchurch, London, 350 St. Mary’s Church, Reading, 391 St. Michael Bassishaw, London, 61, 65, 66, 225, 447n84, 468n132 St. Omer pedigree, 421 St. Paul, 129, 147 St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, 46, 63, 339, 463n2 St. Peter’s Hill, London, 171, 228 St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, 306, 308, 357, 428 Salisbury, Robert Cecil, 2d earl of, 33–34, 156, 443n68 Salt, Peter, 254, 283–93, 464n31, 475nn8, 9, 17, 476nn38, 40, 489n172, 490n202 Saltmarsh, John, 395 Sarpi, Paolo, 142, 457n71 Savage, Thomas, 1st viscount, 205

Savile, Henry, 163 Saunder pedigree, 421 Savonarola, 43 Savoy, 215, 454n224 Saxe-Weimar, John Ernest, duke of, 124 Saxon Anonymous, 126, 360 Saxony, 125, 129, 132, 238, 279, 473n105 Saxony, John George, duke of, 70, 161 Say and Sele, William Fiennes, 1st viscount and 8th baron, 114, 256, 276, 470n2 Scaliger, Joseph, 39, 297 Scots, 153; religion of, 256, 268, 305; rebellion of, 255–56, 284, 288, 290, 292, 295, 297, 298, 302, 303, 481n61; peace negotiations with, 310, 314, 319, 329, 330, 332, 224, 225; Parliament’s alliance with, 352, 405, 407, 410, 411 Scott, John, 86, 447n92 Scott, Thomas, 74, 132, 456n55 Scudamore, James, 56, 75 scutage, 289 Seaford, Sussex, 325 Sejanus, 86 Selden, John, 236, 307, 325, 404, 409, 459nn102, 106, 487n104 Seneca, 152, 168, 335, 457n71 sequestration process, 403, 425, 486n67, 487n104 Servetus, Michael, 129, 259, 276, 279, 276 Seton, Sir John, 290, 292, 302, 304, 307 Sharpe, Kevin, 1, 2, 196, 222 Sharpe, Leonell, 88, 451n167 Sheldon, Richard, 87 ’s-Hertogenbosch, 155, 156, 158, 459n113 ship money, 34, 82, 254–56, 262, 263, 281–94, 303, 315, 316, 319–22, 335, 336, 393, 467n123. See also taxation Shute, Josiah, 87 Sidney, Sir Philip, 27, 90 Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, 64, 181, 243 Siena, 214 Simonds, Johanna (grandmother), 17, 19, 21 Simonds, Richard (grandfather), 17–23, 26, 41, 44, 46 Simony, 181 Six Clerks’ Office, Chancery Lane,

Index London, 24, 43, 46, 48, 61, 101, 133, 135, 174, 225, 453n223, 457nn57, 58 Sleidanus (Johannes Sleidan), 129 smallpox, 10, 102, 174, 282, 342–48, 413 Smart, Peter, 316 Smith, Johannes (Smetius), 419 Smith, William, 91 Smyrna, 239 Socinianism, 148 Socinus, 259, 279, 296, 456n48 Sodomy, 81, 273 Soissons, count of, 253 Solemn League and Covenant, 404–6, 410 Somerset, Frances Howard, countess of, 27, 28 Somerset, Robert Carr, 1st earl of, 27, 28 Somner, William, 431 Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, 3d earl of, 28, 75, 321, 449n118 Spain, 25, 75, 76, 78, 79, 84, 85, 131, 134, 136, 138, 140–42, 144, 149, 155–58, 169, 209, 245–47, 249, 271, 286, 318, 458n77 Speed, George, 198, 413, 430 Spelman, Sir Henry, 170, 229, 231, 297–99, 469n149, 476n54 Spenser, Edmund, 41 Spiera, Francis, 101 Spinola, Ambrogio, marquis of Los Balbases, 70 Spring, Sir William, MP, 68, 85, 86, 136, 137, 159, 212, 457nn66, 67 Stanley, John, 107 Star Chamber, Court of, 12, 49, 152, 196, 241, 315, 316, 335, 356, 464n31 Starkey, Ralph, 73, 163, 164, 449n125, 460n140 Stationers’ Company, 63 Stephen, king of England, 232 Stephens, Ellen, 66 Stephens, William, 66 Steward, William, 420, 490n178 Stock, Richard, 87 Stone, Robert, 210, 246–48, 253, 466n83, 471nn34, 37 Stow Hall, 6, 14, 15, 25, 28, 30, 32, 42, 43, 57, 58, 85, 94, 98–100, 103, 104, 114, 115, 117, 121, 130, 141, 143, 148, 151, 173–79, 182–84, 186, 187, 190–92, 195–98, 200, 203–6, 208, 212,

215–18, 225, 227, 229–31, 234–36, 246, 248, 265, 279, 301, 305, 342, 343, 345–48, 413, 420, 452n188, 453n205, 465n72, 476n53, 492n230 Stowlangtoft, Suffolk, 13, 24, 25, 32, 58, 59, 64, 68, 77, 89, 98, 103, 119, 145, 158, 166, 181, 187, 198, 261, 294, 350, 392, 413, 418, 421, 430, 453nn205, 21, 457n66, 473n97, 486n68 Stoye, John, 6, 466n92 Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of, 4, 307, 309, 315, 314, 322, 403, 480n40; trial of, 335–36 Strangeways, Sir Giles, 66, 259 Strangeways, James, 421 Strangeways, Sir John, MP, 66, 259, 316, 330, 421 Strode, William, MP, 152, 328, 331, 348, 351, 356, 364, 365, 368, 369, 374, 373, 385, 386, 388, 389, 398, 397, 406, 483n131, 485n145, 487n78 Stuteville, John, 211, 306, 421, 430, 434–35 Stuteville, Sir Martin, 2, 9, 109, 171, 283; visits, 58, 130, 148, 174–75, 257; correspondence with, 79–80, 85, 123, 126–30, 132–33, 136–38, 152, 158–63, 177, 182, 184–85, 189, 242, 286; on the earl of Oxford’s case, 68; on Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, 240 Stuteville, Lady Susan, 109, 197, 234, 307, 347, 430, 431 Stuteville, Thomas, 425 Sudbury, Massachusetts, 277, 474n120 Sudbury, Suffolk, 3, 13, 89, 96, 229, 262, 290, 304, 415, 416, 489n153 Suffolk, Theophilus Howard, 3d earl of, 283 Sweden, 124, 125, 158, 161, 243, 244, 251, 455n. See also Gustavus Adolphus Symonds, Thomas, 259 Synod of Dort, 34, 297, 443n71, 456n48 Tacitus, 288, 292, 312, 335, 420, 489n172 tallage, 289, 386 Tally Office, 191, 225, 226, 228 Talworth Wratting church, Suffolk, 232 Tate, Francis, 57, 446n56

509

510

Index taxation, 208, 286–88, 316, 332–35, 401. See also ship money Temple Church, 72, 87, 88 Tertullian, 266 Tewkesbury, 325, 479n6 Thetford, 211 Thirty Nine Articles, 121 Thirty Years’ War, 1, 8, 23, 34–35, 55, 64, 66, 69, 118, 131, 156, 201, 253, 256, 269, 313 Thornham Magna, Suffolk. See Great Thornham Hall Thuliessen [Taliesin], Ambrose, 167 Tiberius, 86 Tienen, Brabant, 246, 471n31 Tilly, John Tzerklaes, count of, 125, 131, 240, 246, 448n100 Tilman, Edward, 93, 181, 452n188 Tower of London, 2, 55–59, 67, 86, 125, 147, 163, 165, 168–70, 174, 219, 221, 225, 302, 315, 318, 319, 326, 327, 330, 361, 370, 395, 418 Tracy, Lady Elizabeth, 111, 177 Tracy, Sir John, 229 Traill, James, 303 Trajan, 288, 476n28 Transylvania, 42, 246 Traquair, John Stuart, 1st earl of, 218 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 22, 448n96 Trinity College, Cambridge, 38, 227, 247, 295, 296 Trojan War, 168, 194 Trojans, 167, 168 Troy, 165, 166 Turin, 159, 215 Turks, 35, 128, 170, 180, 214, 215, 239, 246, 255, 269, 271, 286, 287, 302, 339, 352, 412 Twysden, Sir Roger, 425 Tynes, Edward, 238–39 Tyrrell, Sir John, 425 Underdown, David, 427 Unesuerus, 421 United Provinces, 9, 124, 132, 141, 156, 157, 158, 171, 201, 244, 245, 424, 459n113. See also Dutch Republic Upminster, 68, 170, 225, 447n84 Ussher, James, archbishop, 87, 236, 299–301, 303, 418, 428, 460n138, 469n149, 481n52, 482n99

usury, 22, 119, 195, 224, 226, 455n12 Utrecht, 155, 249, 429 Van Loë, Mary, 61 Van Meteren, Emmanuel, 168 Van Schurmann, Anna Maria, 429–30, 491n218 Van Tromp, Martin, 302, 424 Vane, Sir Henry (the elder), secretary of state, MP, 307, 313, 333 Vane, Sir Henry (the younger), MP, 387, 393, 404 Varro, 165 Vaughan, Henry, MP, 362 Venice, 214, 215, 217, 257 venison, 154, 178 Venus, 193, 464n25 Vere, Sir Horace, 42, 68, 110 Vergil, Polydore, 167 Virgil, 25, 166 Virgin Mary, 87 Vitellius, 298 Vorstius, Conrad, 82, 276, 456n48 Vortigern, 269, 271, 272, 300 Walbrook parish, London, 102 Waldegrave, Francis, 104, 108, 473n87 Waldegrave, Jemima, 104, 105, 108 Waldensians, 267 Wallenstein, Count Albrecht von, 149, 160, 253 Waller, Edmund, MP, 370 Waller, Sir William, MP, 373 Wallis, James, 91 Walsham, Alexandra, 263 Walsingham, Sir Francis, 163, 164 Waltham Forest, Essex, 320 Wambroke, Dorset, 22 Wanley, Humphrey, 6 Ward, Rowley, 52 Ward, Samuel, Lady Margaret professor of divinity at Cambridge, 243, 258, 460n131 Ward, Samuel, preacher at Ipswich, Suffolk, 89, 96, 121 Wards, Court of, 349, 383, 385 Warre, Mr., 73 Warwick, Robert Rich, 2d earl of, 320, 363 Watertown, Massachusetts, 277, 464n23, 474n122 Waterton pedigree, 421

Index Watford, Hertfordshire, 320 Watson, Andrew, 184, 418, 429n2, 446n58, 449n125, 460n142, 468n130, 468n144, 489n160 Watson, Sir Lewis, 133 weaning, 199, 200 Weckherlin, George, 210, 238, 472n79 Weekly Assessment, 403 Welles pedigree, 421 Welshall, Suffolk, 19, 20, 22, 441n10 Wentworth, Sir Peter, MP, 387, 393, 397, 401, 486n67 Wesel, 155, 158, 459nn113, 114 Westminster Assembly of Divines, 405–9, 416, 428, 442n51 Weston, Hugh, 273 wetnurse, 189, 198, 199, 204, 429 Wheelock, Abraham, 295–97, 304–5, 312, 314, 318, 381, 422, 476n58, 477n96, 491n225 White, Francis, bishop, 87, 182 White, John, MP, 317, 414, 416 White, Richard, 19, 19, 22, 23 White Mountain, battle of, 69, 70, 73, 133 Whitelocke, Bulstrode, 4 Wilde, Serjeant John, MP, 329 William I, king of England (the Conqueror), 57, 163, 219, 286, 318, 352, 381 William of Malmesbury, 168 William of Newburgh, 231 Williams, John, bishop, 52, 53 Williams, Roger, 275 Wilne, Derbyshire, 417 Willoughby de Eresby, Robert Bertie, 14th baron of (later 1st earl of Lindsey), 67–68 Wilughby, Sir Henry, baronet, 375–81, 417, 485nn9, 10 Wilughby, Katherine, 375, 376

Wimbledon, Edward Cecil, 1st viscount of, 146, 174, 208, 464n40 Windebanke, Sir Francis, 314, 316, 318, 319 Wingfield, Sir Anthony, 8 Winthrop, John, 242, 278 Wise, Thomas, MP, 309 Wishart, George, 272 Witherby, 414 Wolrave of Namurs, 62 Worcester Abbey, 57 Worden, Blair, 432 Wotton, Roger, 211, 217 Wray, Sir John, MP, 331, 340 Wray, Sir John, of Glentworth, 431 Wren, Matthew (bishop), 13, 250, 257– 65, 268, 269, 299, 316, 318, 323, 338, 376, 412, 466n98, 472n75 Wright, G., 414 Wright, John, 169, 473, n81 Wriothesley, James, 75 Wroth, Sir Thomas, 293 Würzburg, 243 Wycliffe, John, 268 Wynne, Lady Anne, 375–79 Wynne, Sir Richard, 376 Xenophon, 155, 168, 457n71 Yelverton, Sir Christopher, MP, 355 Ynojosa, Juan de Mendoza, marquis of, 76, 78 York House Conference, 79, 338 Young, Patrick (Patricius Junius), 290, 297–98, 418–19, 477n69, 489n163 Zachareia, daughter of Englebert of Nassau, 62 Zeeland, 61 Zenobia, 138 Zeuxis, 193, 464n25

511