Simonds D'Ewes (1602–1650) was the quintessential observer, a bystander and watcher of great events. Rather than a maker of history he was its amanuensis, a recorder of words and actions. From the 1620s to the 1640s, he took detailed notes on sermons and lectures, on arguments in courts, on his voluminous reading, and on debates in the House of Commons. He gatecrashed the coronation of Charles I in 1626 and left a first-hand account of those proceedings. He followed the unfolding of religious war in Europe as an avid consumer of news. Most important, as a member of the revolutionary English parliament that met in November 1640, he made detailed notes on the speeches and votes that carried the nation to civil war. If he exaggerated his own intervention in those debates and transcribed speeches he would have liked to have given, that was not unusual. D'Ewes's record of the crisis of the kingdom provides a lasting monument, of much more importance than his treatises on idolatry and persecution.

The autobiography of Sir Simonds D'Ewes was published in 1845, and his journal of the beginning of the Long Parliament appeared in 1923. Countless scholars have relied on these editions for insights into the English Revolution. But the autobiography has long been known to have been bowdlerized, the parliamentary journal is self-centered, and D'Ewes's vast archive of correspondence and manuscripts has been almost completely ignored. Reappraisal is overdue, and scholarly editions are still wanting. Sears McGee has taken on the heroic task of combing D'Ewes's papers to produce the first comprehensive biography, a capacious and sympathetic account of the man and his times.

An Industrious Mind is a substantial achievement of lasting merit, a product of industrious research. Biographer and subject appear well matched. McGee follows D'Ewes from cradle to grave, indeed from ancestors to descendants, and he interweaves the story with the drama of the nation. In this treatment, however, English history serves more as framework for elucidating D'Ewes than an arena in which an individual's experience might be gauged as distinct or representative. Every strand of D'Ewes's life gets its due, from his privileged childhood and student days, through his courtship and family life, to his more public role as a county sheriff and member of parliament. But the reader never learns the extent to which the peculiarities of D'Ewes's life matched those of his contemporaries.

A case in point is the subject's marriage. After searching for a partner with suitable wealth and bloodlines, D'Ewes settled on the thirteen-year-old Anne Clopton, who experienced at least ten pregnancies before she died in 1641. A year later, at the age of forty, D'Ewes took another teenage bride, the fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Wilughby. At a time when most women married in their twenties, these were unusual age horizons, but the typicality or oddness (or for some readers, the creepiness) of D'Ewes's choice is unmentioned. The politics of D'Ewes's puritanism, his scruples about Ship Money, and his consideration of emigration to New England would likewise have been illuminated by comparison with his contemporaries, though doing so would have made the book even longer.

Provided by inheritance and by marriage with a landed fortune, D'Ewes was free to pursue his passion for antiquities, documents, coins, and genealogy. His greatest pleasures lay in the historical records of the nation, in the muniments of the neighboring aristocracy, and in his own expanding collection of manuscripts and treasures. As a gentleman scholar of great erudition, he used his command of Anglo-Saxon philology and early church history to reflect on the crises of the present. D'Ewes the puritan was convinced that the Pelagian heresy of the late Roman era had been revived in the churchmanship of bishops William Laud, Matthew Wren, and the ascendant ceremonialist Arminians. As member of parliament in the 1640s, he lent his learning as well as his voice to the reformation of religion and promotion of the Protestant cause. It was possible to see him as a pedant, a prig, and a snob, but McGee celebrates his indefatigable earnestness and his fervent piety.

Religion was central to D'Ewes's life, and McGee gives it good measure. He was one of the godly, a disciplined lay puritan, a practitioner of fasts, and a devoted follower of sermons. A convinced Calvinist, he was comfortable with the church under James I but aghast when Charles I altered its direction. Soteriological certainty went hand in hand with opposition to altars and Arminianism. Amid the anti-episcopal frenzy of the Long Parliament, D'Ewes argued that bishops should be stripped of their baronies and excluded from political office, not abolished altogether. His contribution to the revolution was a scholarly, judicious moderation, that eventually left him marginalized. If he emerged as a Presbyterian, it was to counter the radicalism of the army and the Independents rather than to promote a clerical ascendancy. Disquiet at the continuance of civil war drove him back to his manuscripts and his passion for pedigrees and lineages. His world impinged on him, more than he gave shape to it.