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This book offers an alternative interpretation of pre-Civil War England, challenging the standard narrative that English Presbyterianism was successfully extinguished from the late sixteenth century until its prominent public resurgence during the English Civil War. From their emergence in the 1570s, English Presbyterians posed a threat to the Church of England, and, in 1592, the English crown arrested the leaders of the Presbyterian movement. The author shows that, during the ensuing half century of apparent silence, English Presbyterians remained continually active, making a concerted effort, for example, to build an alliance with common lawyers against episcopal authority. Yet they also sought to prove the compatibility of their church government with royal supremacy. English Presbyterians agitated for further reformation of the Church of England, but by the early seventeenth century, they had contributed to the birth of “independency” and to puritan appeals to neo-Roman views of liberty.

This is the first biography of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, an English country gentleman, lawyer, Puritan, historian and antiquarian who lived from 1602-1650. He left the most extensive archive of personal papers of any individual in early modern Europe, and this is the first thorough exploration of it. Biographies of his contemporaries usually emphasize either their public or private lives, but not both, because of the limitations of the sources. For D’Ewes, both are richly available and provide the basis for the most detailed description of an individual’s life from childhood until death that can be written. His relationships with his two young wives and their children and his parents, siblings, friends and enemies are vividly portrayed. His life and thought before the Long Parliament to which he was elected in 1640 are carefully analyzed, so that the mind of one of the Parliamentarian opponents of King Charles I’s policies can understood more fully than any other MP. Although conservative in social and political terms, D’Ewes’s Puritanism prevented him from joining his Royalist younger brother Richard during the civil war that began in 1642. In the late 1630s, he seriously considered emigration to Massachusetts. He collected one of the largest private libraries of books and manuscripts in England in his era and used them to pursue historical and antiquarian researches. He followed news of national and international events voraciously and conveyed his opinions of them in to his friends in many hundreds of letters.

This book surveys the channels through which political ideas and knowledge were conveyed to the English people from the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth I to the Revolution of 1688. It argues that an assessment of English political culture requires an examination of all means by which this culture was expressed and communicated. While the discussion focuses primarily on genres such as the sermon, newsbook, poetry, and drama, it also considers the role of events and institutions. This book explores and elucidates the entire web of communication in early modern English political life.