Sir Simonds D’Ewes has been something of a godsend to historians of early modern Britain. More than his Puritanism, his role in the Long Parliament, his prominence within the Suffolk gentry, or his legal training, D’Ewes was distinguished by a mania to create and accumulate texts. He was a prolific recorder of his own life, composing an autobiography and a diary, maintaining a voluminous correspondence, and recording the fullest journals of the Long Parliament. All of these have been critical materials for historians investigating the reigns of James I and Charles I, the process by which grudging cooperation yielded to outright conflict, and the dynamics that divided parliament and army and ultimately led to regicide. Moreover, D’Ewes turned the practice of collecting beyond himself, and his antiquarian interests led him to transcribe heaps of historical documents. Most notably, he is responsible for preserving virtually all surviving journals of Elizabethan parliaments. The manuscript collections he compiled live on in prominence, as they provided the initial seed of the Harley collection now in the British Library.

Though historians have long relied on D’Ewes’s labors to illuminate the context in which he lived, they have rarely examined the man himself. J. Sears McGee’s An Industrious Mind admirably fills this void. McGee’s scrupulous, comprehensive biography is as alert to D’Ewes’s public as to his private life, gliding between heavily detailed descriptions of his theological commitments, scholarly interests, engagement in public affairs, and heartbreaking family life.

Son of an exacting Six Clerk and the inheritor of a sizable fortune, the young D’Ewes immersed himself in scholarship and divinity. After absorbing Puritan teachings at Cambridge he was admitted to the Middle Temple. In London he became part of the emerging antiquarian community, preferring the perusal of Tower records to ordinary legal pursuits. He befriended Robert Cotton and gained the acquaintance of Dutch and English correspondents who assisted him by transcribing materials for his unachievable range of envisioned projects, while also providing him with news that he circulated in turn. His 1626 marriage to Anne Clopton brought him greater wealth, but it also relocated him from London to Suffolk, where his antiquarian pursuits suffered from a lack of access to sources and his new manorial responsibilities. Their marriage was a loving one, but it was marred by a tragic succession of children dying. Splitting time between Suffolk and London, D’Ewes watched in horror as Charles, whom he had hoped would be the bulwark for international Protestantism that James had not been, instead encroached on the parliamentary privileges D’Ewes saw as confirmed by his collections. Worse, Charles encouraged the spread of the Arminianism, which D’Ewes saw as reviving the ancient heresy of Pelagianism, and in the late 1630s he contemplated migrating to New England. First elected to parliament in 1640, D’Ewes immediately became a prominent voice. His knowledge of English precedent was highly respected, and he pressed for parliament to rid the Anglican Church of its Laudian heresies, while nonetheless hoping for peaceful reconciliation with the king. However, he soon found himself isolated — neither radical enough for what he called “the fiery spirits,” nor willing to abjure his earlier complaints and join his brother in the king’s party. After a public rebuke in 1642 his role diminished; in subsequent years he only occasionally and always futilely asserted his convictions, before finally disappearing from public life with Pride’s Purge shortly before his sudden death in 1650.

For McGee, D’Ewes life exemplifies the tenets of revisionism —even those horrified by Caroline innovation were generally unsympathetic to revolutionary programs and intent on finding consensus. In this view, the dismantling of the Anglican Church, the rise of the army, and regicide were driven by a small, unrepresentative cohort who briefly allied with those like D’Ewes and then, once enabled, increasingly monopolized power and left their many former allies to twist. This argument emerges in a brief epilogue and could have been more prominent, especially as a means to analyze D’Ewes’s private life and scholarship, which otherwise seem uncertainly connected to the larger point. More strikingly, McGee never addresses why D’Ewes was so devoted to inscription and collection, practices that were neither natural nor obvious to Englishmen at this time and were in fact just becoming broadly important to political life. But this isolation of D’Ewes from context is an understandable but lamentable byproduct of the inclusion of the wealth of detail, and it is the powerfully microscopic perspective on D’Ewes’s life that will make this work so valuable to historians of early modern Britain.