The huge archive of the personal papers (most of them unexamined by historians) of Sir Simonds D'Ewes afford us an intimate view of both the public and private lives of a seventeenth-century gentleman-a Puritan, a Parliamentarian, a lawyer, genealogist, and antiquarian who deepens our understanding of the reasons why Britain plunged into civil wars in the 1640s and why the wars had the consequences that they did.