Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 14.djvu/458

 to be opening for him. 'But,' he tells us, 'when I saw the church of God and the gospel to be almost everywhere ruined abroad, or to be in great peril and danger, and daily feared that things would grow worse at home, I laid by all these aspiring hopes, and ... I resolved to moderate my desires, and to prepare my way to a better life with the greater serenity of mind and reposedness of spirit, by avoiding these two dangerous rocks of avarice and ambition.' The real, or at any rate the moving cause of his retirement from the bar, however, was that at this time he had been fortunate enough to arrange a marriage for himself with Anne, daughter and heir of Sir William Clopton, late of Lutons Hall in Suffolk. The lady had a considerable estate, and her lands marched with his father's property. The love-letter in which he made his first advances to the young lady, though a ridiculous composition, D'Ewes was so proud of, that he has given it us in his 'Autobiography.' The marriage was solemnised in Blackfriars Church on 24 Oct. 1626, the bride being then in her fourteenth year. On 6 Dec. D'Ewes received the honour of knighthood at Whitehall, and shortly afterwards he took a house in Islington and devoted himself with extraordinary industry to the study of the 'Records,' copying out or analysing such manuscripts as could throw any light on English history and genealogy. But frightened by what he calls the ' terrible censure ' passed upon a Mr. Palmer by the Star-chamber, which inflicted upon the unhappy man a fine of a thousand pounds for staying in London during the last long vacation, notwithstanding the king's proclamation, D'Ewes removed in 1632 to Bury St. Edmunds, and occupied himself there in making copious extracts from the registers and other documents which had once formed part of the muniments of the great abbey, and had come into the possession of Sir Edmund Bacon of Redgrave. His father had died in March 1631, but D'Ewes did not take up his residence in the family mansion, Stow Langtoft Hall, till June 1633. Here he was much worried by the parson of the parish, who was a careless and quarrelsome man, and had no sympathy with D'Ewes's pronounced puritanical views, or his studious habits. From his boyhood he had kept an elaborate record of all he read and wrote and saw, and as these diaries had grown to some bulk, he appears to have conceived the design of summarising them in the form of an autobiography first in 1637 (cf. i. 402). If he ever continued this work after the death of his little son in 1636, the manuscript has not been preserved. In 1639 he was appointed to serve the office of high sheriff for the county of Suffolk, and when the Long parliament was summoned to meet at Westminster on 3 Nov. 1640 D'Ewes took his seat as M.P. for the borough of Sudbury, and soon began to play a part in the debates and became a person of consideration. He was one of the committee to whom Prynne's and Burton's petitions were referred in December (ii. 251), and he spoke on more than one occasion, siding with the puritan faction in the house, but already taking up ground which the more fiery spirits could not tolerate, inasmuch as it indicated a resolution to follow reason and law rather than passion. The king, always on the watch to secure the support of any among the moderate party, offered D'Ewes a baronetcy, which was accepted and conferred upon him 15 July 1641, Whatever satisfaction he may have felt on acquiring this barren honour, was speedily spoilt by the loss of his young wife, for whom he entertained a romantic affection, and who died a fortnight after her husband had been made a baronet. When the civil war began D'Ewes threw in his lot with the parliament, and took the solemn league and covenant in 1643. Nevertheless he was not considered a safe man by the party he had allied himself to. Though he had begun by taking notes of the business in parliament, he soon tired of it, and probably was no very assiduous attendant at the house during the stormy debates, that scarcely deserved to be called such, while the war was raging. On 6 Dec. 1648 D'Ewes was one of the first forty-one members who were expelled the house by Colonel Pride (, Cromwell, i. 399). He never returned; perhaps he was glad to escape the duties which had become distasteful and odious to a man of earnestness and sobriety, and he retired to his estate in Suffolk, and died at Stow Langtoft Hall on 8 April 1650, in his forty-ninth year. D'Ewes married as his second wife Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Henry Willoughby, bart., of Risley in Derbyshire, by whom he had a son Willoughby, who succeeded him in his title and estates. The baronetcy became extinct in 1731 (, Extinct Baronetage).

D'Ewes was the beau-ideal of an antiquary; with no masculine tastes or interests, his very political opinions were the result of his researches. With a power of continuous application that knew no weariness, and an insatiable curiosity which kept him always on the watch for new evidence that might throw some light on the past, with ample means, which he never grudged spending when there was a coin to buy or a manuscript to get copied, and so courageous a belief in his own capacity of work that he was not afraid to map