Sir Simonds D'Ewes and "the poitovin cholick": Persecution, toleration, and the mind of a puritan member of the long parliament

Canadian Journal of History

Volumn 38, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 481-491

  McGee, Sears ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 70449941943     PISSN: 00084107     EISSN: 00084107     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3138/cjh.38.3.481     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. J. O. Halliwell, ed., The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D'Ewes, Bart. (London, 1845), 1,256
2. Halliwell's second volume (pp. 159-318) contains a sampling from the many volumes of D'Ewes's letters in the Harleian Manuscripts, but it represents the tip of the iceberg. An honorable exception to the neglect of D'Ewes's correspondence is Peter Salt's article, "Sir Simonds D'Ewes and the Levying of Ship Money, 1635-1640," Historical Journal. 37 (1994), 253-87. Parts of the correspondence are in Latin, such as the exchanges with Albert Joachimi. Quotations below from his letters to Joachimi are from translations made initially by Nigel Rubbra and revised by Peter Salt. I am very grateful to Mr. Salt for making them available to me
3. Primitive Practise (London, 1645), p. 1. I have used "The second Impression, more exact then the former," which differs from the first in that the errata listed in the first have been corrected. The second impression also has a commendation from the Parliamentary licenser, John Bachiler, who commends 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
4. On p. 4, he denounced the Saxon Lutherans for their allegiance "to the Popish party then to 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
5. British Library Harley MS 377, f. 261
6. Primitive Practise, p. 48
7. The work is another example of the operation of Laudian censorship in the nuanced sense aptly examined by Anthony Milton in his article, "Licensing, Censorship, and Religious Orthodoxy in Early Stuart England," Historical Journal, 41(1998), pp. 625-651
8. An indication that the text D'Ewes published in 1645 had been little altered from what he wrote in 1637 appears on p. 37. There the text fulminates at length on the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in Paris in 1572 as an event "not to be paralleld, in respect of the treachery and inhumanity of it in any Story of the most barbarous Nations in the world, . . . which was never in any possibilitie to be equalled since, but with the Romish Powder-plot in England, had it succeeded." A laconic marginal note adds, without any details, that "the late inhumane massacre and butchery in Ireland hath exceeded it."
9. In an April 1639 letter to Joachimi, D'Ewes summarized New England's story "which is extraordinary and hardly to be equalled by the doings of former times - for, a few pious men, in the beginning of the year 1629, travelled there, not without the growling of bishops and the contempt of the profane. They laic the foundations for the constitution of the finest Church and republic, by sending down crimes and heresies to Hell and strenuously carrying out a sanctified life. Up to about forty thousand of our people have fixed their abodes there already, have founded many towns four hundred miles distant from each other and have provided so great an asylum for all pious people that at present the papists and impious have begun to fear lest Christ reign there with his Gospel, although he may be exiled from elsewhere...." (B. L. Harley MS 377, f. 280)
10. B. Kiefer Lewalski, "The Authorship of Ancient Bounds," Church History, 22 (1947), 192-96
11. My article arguing that Rous and Sprigge wrote it is forthcoming as "Francis Rous and 'Scabby or Itchy Children': the Problem of Toleration in 1645" in the Huntington Library Quarterly, 67 (2004)
12. The Assembly of God, p. 496
13. J. R. De Witt, Jus Divinum (Kampen, 1969), p. 180
14. B. L. Harley MS 164, f. 194v
15. B.L. Harley MS 379, f. 75
16. Cf. B. L. Harley MSS 374, f. 151 and 378, fols. 46-7, 52, 53
17. Puritans in Politics: the Religious Legislation of the Long Parliament 1640-1647 (Appleford, 1981), pp. 160ff
18. Elizabeth Bourcier, ed., The Diary of Sir Simonds D'Ewes 1622-1624 (Paris, 1974), pp. 181-82. In his Autobiography ( 1, 141-42), he expressed pleasure that Anabaptist and Pelagian heresies, as well as the idolatry of bowing at the altar, were not yet in vogue in Cambridge when he left St. John's in 1620. But this could have been hindsight, since he wrote the final version of this book in 1636-37. Nicholas Tyacke has noted that "direct evidence... of lay attitudes" about this issue is "relatively hard to find," and in the 1624 parliament he found only two "Calvinist activists recorded," John Pym and Thomas Wentworth. Anti-Calvinists (Oxford, 1987), pp.125, 130. D'Ewes, though not an MP until 1640, was certainly an anti-Arminian by 1624
19. He frequently cited "Thuanus" and sought to emulate him in his own historical writing. He purchased his copy of De Thou's History in London on 10 July 1634 and read all five volumes by late in the following year (Autobiography, II, 92-93 and 127-28. See also I, 5, 83-84, 99, 105)
20. For example, on p. 35 of Primitive Practise, he rhapsodized about "Incomparable Monsieur de Thou (who is a glory to the Romish Synagogue it selfe, and whose History the most exact and excellent that was ever written by a humane pen, ought alwayes to be deare to the Christian world)." D'Ewes even commissioned his brother Richard, during his travels in France in 1638, to seek out de Thou's kinsmen and procure a likeness of the French master (who had died in 1617) to hang in his library at Stowlangtoft, Suffolk. B. L. Harley MS 383, fols. 150v, 153r