across national boundaries. This work was dedicated to his patron Sir Thomas Rowe, and had been written in 1638. In 1639 Viscount Mandeville was writing to Dury, in the context that the situation in particular of German Protestants was being mooted and linked to the possibility of the English and Scottish churches could organise or broker such a union. In 1641, Dury and Comenius came to England; an invitation had been mooted in a sermon by John Gauden in 1641, at the start of the Long Parliament. The backers of the scheme to bring Comenius then included John Pym and Lord Brooke as well as Mandeville. Dury gave a well-known sermon to the Parliament on 26 November 1645, Israels Call to March out of Babylon into Jerusalem. He was given an official appointment, as tutor to the younger children of Charles I; from 1646 these had been in the care of Algernon Percy, 10th Earl of Northumberland. After the war in England had ended, he argued both for religious toleration, and for acceptance of the Parliamentarian regime. He incurred the displeasure of the Westminster Assembly, to which he belonged, for his part in the 1648 publication (with Hartlib and John Goodwin) in the translation of part the theological work Satanae Strategemata of Jacob Acontius on toleration. He called on the Ranter Abiezer Coppe to repent, and helped in drafting his recantation. He provided arguments in pamphlets of March and October 1649 for supporting the Rump Parliament. Hill places Dury with Anthony Ascham and Marchamont Nedham as propounding the theory that Parliament had legitimacy conferred by God because it held power de facto. Barbara Lewalski calls Dury's arguments 'Hobbesian'. Hill considers that the failure of Cromwell's plan to create a unified Protestant church in England of the 1650s put paid to Dury's ecumenical ideas. In 1652 he translated John Milton's Eikonoklastes into French as Eikonoklastēs, ou, Réponse au livre intitulé Eikon basilikē. In 1655 Milton quoted from letters of Dury in his Pro se defensio contra Alexandrum Morum. In 1654 he was sent as a diplomat by Oliver Cromwell to Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. In 1652/3 he had travelled with Bulstrode Whitelocke to Sweden. He also worked with Whitelocke as a deputy librarian, from 1649, of the collection going back to Jane Lumley. His book of 1650 on librarianship, sometimes said to be the first such work, came out of