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Robert Walter Dudley Edwards, known to his friends as Robin, and to his students as 'Dudley' (4 June 1909 – 5 June 1988) was an Irish historian.

He was born in Dublin. His father was Walter Dudley Edwards, a journalist - 'an unassuming and well-read Englishman of liberal inclinations and Liberal association' who came to Ireland with his wife, born Bridget Teresa MacInerney from Clare, and eventually became a civil servant. His mother was a supporter of women's rights and Dudley recalled that he had a 'Votes for Women' flag on his pram. Educated first at the Catholic University School, Robert was removed by his parents to St. Enda's School after the 1916 rising, and then Synge Street CBS, finally returning to the Catholic University School. In his final exams he failed French and Irish but gained first place in Ireland in history.

In University College Dublin he was auditor of the Literary and Historical Society, gained a first-class degree in history in 1929 followed by a first class master's degree in 1931 with the National University of Ireland prize. There followed a travelling studentship to London, where he carried out postgraduate work at the University of London which resulted in the award of a PhD in 1933, published in 1935 as Church and State in Tudor Ireland. Along with Theo Moody he founded the Irish Historical Society in 1936, and its journal Irish Historical Studies was first published in 1938.

In 1937 he was awarded a DLitt by the National University of Ireland and in 1939 was appointed to a statutory lectureship in Modern Irish History at University College Dublin. He succeeded Mary Hayden to the Chair of Modern Irish History in 1944, which he held until he retired in 1979. His contribution to the discipline of history in Ireland was substantial, and included the setting up of the university archives.

In 1933, he married Sheila O'Sullivan, a folklorist and teacher. They had three children: a daughter, Mary; another daughter, Ruth Dudley Edwards, who is a historian, crime novelist, journalist and broadcaster, and one son Owen Dudley Edwards, who is a historian at the University of Edinburgh. Sheila died in April 1985. Robert Dudley Edwards died in 1988 in St. Vincent's Hospital after a short illness.

Works

• Church and State in Tudor Ireland. A history of penal laws against Irish Catholics, 1534-1603 (Longmans and Company, London: 1935)
• The great famine: studies in Irish History 1845-52 (Editor, with Desmond Williams; Browne and Nolan, Dublin: 1956)
• A New History of Ireland, (Gill and Macmillan, Dublin: 1972)
• Irish Families: the archival aspect, (National University of Ireland, Dublin: 1974)
• Daniel O'Connell and his world, (Thames and Hudson, London: 1975)
• Ireland in the age of the Tudors : the destruction of Hiberno-Norman civilization, (Croom Helm, London; Barnes and Noble, New York: 1977)
• Sources for Early Modern Irish History, 1534-1641, (with Mary O'Dowd, Cambridge University Press: 1985)

See also

• Auditors of the Literary and Historical Society (University College Dublin)

References

1. ^ "Dr Robin Dudley Edwards dies in Dublin", Irish Times, 6 June 1988
2. ^ Aidan Clarke, "Robert Dudley Edwards (1909-88)", Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 26, No. 102 (Nov., 1988), pp. 121-127
3. National Archives of Ireland, Census 1911
4. "Mrs Sheila Dudley Edwards", Irish Times, 22 April 1985.

External links

• UCD archives profile
• Profile from Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)

• 1909 births
• 1988 deaths
• People from County Dublin
• Irish historians
• Alumni of the University of London
• Auditors of the Literary and Historical Society (University College Dublin)