The Discovery of D'Ewes's Long Parliament Diary

Abstract

2023 marked the centenary of Wallace Notestein's edition of part of Sir Simonds D'Ewes's journal of the Long Parliament. This essay treats the diary's pre‐Notestein emergence as a prime source for the history of the Long Parliament. Thomas Carlyle was first to publicise the diary. He could not read it but paid for a ‘transcript’ of major passages. Though only indirectly useful to Carlyle's project of editing Oliver Cromwell's letters and speeches, the so‐called transcript prompted Carlyle to experiment at the boundary of history and fiction. Carlyle passed the transcript to the antiquary John Bruce and to John Forster. Both praised the diary, touted their paleographical skills, and also relied on the ‘transcript’. Whatever their paleographical limitations, their enthusiasm canonised the text. When Samuel Rawson Gardiner turned to the Long Parliament, D'Ewes's diary joined the Thomason tracts and the State Papers as foundational sources. Though he owed his source‐agenda to Carlyle, Bruce, Forster and J. L. Sanford, Gardiner was determined to supersede them, in large part by correcting their use of D'Ewes's diary. In Forster's case, Gardiner verged on the patricidal. This was a moment in the bifurcation of ‘history’ from ‘letters’, and in the creation of the historical ‘profession’.