Ahead of next Tuesday’s Parliaments, Politics and People seminar, we hear from Stephen Roberts, emeritus director of the History of Parliament. On 25 June 2024 Stephen will discuss the diarizing habit of Sir Simonds D’Ewes during the Long Parliament.
This seminar takes place between 5.30 and 6.30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.
The diaries of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (1602-50), MP for Sudbury 1640-1648, have been the bedrock of studies of the Long Parliament and its members since at least the early Victorian period. The best-known of these, his parliamentary diary, composed in English, runs from 3 November 1640 until 3 November 1645. The portion of it that extends from 1640 until 17 September 1642 has at various times and formats been edited and published, leaving the remainder in unpublished transcript only. The explicit aim of D’Ewes’s modern editors has been to produce a text that sheds light on parliamentary proceedings, with much less focus on the text and how it came to be produced.
On 1 January 1644 D’Ewes began to keep a parallel diary, in Latin, which he kept up, as far as we know, until 24 March 1647. None of this material has yet been published, although a project at the History of Parliament to make a transcript and English translation has been in progress for many years. A third parallel diary, in cypher, covering the whole of 1643, remains the unconquered Everest of D’Ewes studies. All of this material is essential to an understanding of the daily life of the Long Parliament, but of course also to penetrating the mind and outlook of D’Ewes himself as diarist, autobiographer and self-analyst.
Essential to understanding D’Ewes’s practice and motives in diarizing is his long habit of it, engrained by 1640. It has long been known that he kept a personal diary as early as 1620, but recently it has been shown that he was keeping one, now lost, from 1618-20, and that there was once another diary, also missing, for the years 1627-35.[1] Just as important in shaping the diaries were his expertise and learning in antiquarian pursuits, to which because of inherited wealth he had been able to devote himself virtually full-time for many years.
By early 1642 D’Ewes was seeking to distance himself from his fellow parliamentary diarists and what he considered their inferior method of simply consulting the Commons clerk, Henry Elsying, while he was writing up the official Journal. D’Ewes prided himself on relying instead on his own memory, which may seem to us a fallible and inferior way of proceeding, but it is an early indication that the diarizing was a self-conscious intellectual act, not a simple exercise in gathering information. He sat in the Commons chamber to create his diary until 23 July 1642 when he was the subject of a mortifying put-down by Speaker Lenthall which provoked unkind laughter at D’Ewes’s expense. Thereafter he wrote up back at his house in Covent Garden, very often as the first activity of the day after the events he was recording.
The process of writing was more complex than the printed editions would suggest. There were notes, sometimes in Latin, and rough drafts, only some of which have survived on what would become the fair copy. D’Ewes’s secretary, James Hornigold, was an active participant in helping shape the final copy, with differences of wording evident between the rough and fair drafts. June 1643, by which time the parliamentary diaries occupied ‘three great tomes’, marks a point at which D’Ewes was reappraising his own diarizing motives. Disillusioned at what seemed like a failure of the war effort against the king, the unwillingness of radicals in the Commons to contemplate peace, and the serial abuse and disregard of what he considered proper parliamentary process, he decided to persist with the diary ‘to transmit not only the story but the very secret workings and machinations of each party as well of the two houses of parliament chiefly led and guided by some few members of either house as of the king’s party’.
This reappraisal also involved a change of method. D’Ewes adopted what he considered a more artless process, including only ‘remarkable passages’, which he thought useful to posterity because he ‘set down matters with the same freedom with which others spake or acted them’.
His motives for beginning a new diary from January 1644, in Latin, parallel to the parliamentary diary, are never explicitly stated. Because the Latin diary gives a more rounded picture of D’Ewes’s personal day than the parliamentary diary does, it is easy to assume that securing privacy from prying, unlearned eyes might have been the aim. But an important clue is offered by the record in the diary of how much reading and writing in Latin the author has achieved each month (usually not a great deal, in fact). The diary was partly a significant Latin exercise in itself.
D’Ewes has a habit of repetitive, formulaic writing evident in passages in both diaries. In the parliamentary diary he usually prefaces a précis of one of his own speeches with ‘I rose and spake in effect following’; in the Latin he starts each day with letter-writing and diarizing. But the Latin diary involved him in many literary decisions about which Latin vocabulary and constructions were most appropriate for describing parliamentary job titles and committees. Having started with delegatus for MP, in December 1644 he hit on assessor, meaning not one who assesses or levies taxes, but one who sits next to another (from ad-sedere), suggesting a borrowing or invention inspired by classical not medieval Latin sources. He comes up with half a dozen terms for the Committee for Plundered Ministers.
Both diaries are in fact part of an iterative process, both the result of selection, in which material from one could find its way into the other, from what seemed sometimes even to D’Ewes a jumble of notes ‘abstractedly and confusedly taken’. Sometimes the Latin diary provides the key to understanding the parliamentary diary. There is no better example than D’Ewes’s explanation for why he abandoned the parliamentary diary on 3 November 1645. It did not peter out. Rather, the author gave it up on it because exactly five years of the parliament had passed, ‘with the outbreak of war ancient usages had been neglected, and new MPs chosen in a new way, completely contrary to my own view’. In other words, the recruiter elections were the final straw.
D’Ewes records his many antiquarian, intellectual pursuits in the Latin diary. Important among these was his numismatic work. His coin collection arrived in London from Suffolk in January 1645. Had any highwaymen or marauding royalists intercepted the wagon, their relish would quickly have turned to disgust on realising the estimated 6,000 coins were mainly minted in imperial Rome. D’Ewes found at least seven Latin verbs to describe his activities with coins, and they all involve separating and classifying. Processes of selection are evident in his other studies, among the manuscripts he consulted at the Tower of London, and his own library of 700 manuscripts and 7,800 charters. Unsurprisingly, therefore, his mind was pre-disposed to classifying when it came to analyzing the behaviour of his fellow MPs, evident in his commentary on ‘parties’ in June and December 1643.
The price paid for wrenching from the D’Ewes diaries the daily summaries of parliamentary activity is an understanding of their value as autobiography. Only a holistic approach to D’Ewes’s diaries will restore their full scholarly potential as a source for understanding one individual’s perceptions of the world around him. The texts deserve to be treated as artefacts in their own right, not simply as quarry for fact-gathering in pursuit of parliamentary history.
SKR
[1] M. Lockett, M. Leach, ‘The Search for a Lost Diary of Sir Simonds D’Ewes’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 16 (2017), 161-80.
This seminar takes place on 25 June 2024 between 5.30 and 6.30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.
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