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Robert Dudley Edwards (1909–88)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2016

Aidan Clarke
Aidan Clarke*
Affiliation:
Department of Modern History, Trinity College Dublin
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Robert Dudley Edwards died on 5 June 1988 in Dublin, where he had been born seventy-nine years and one day before. In later life, at least, he would have approved of that exact, spare sentence, because in later life he resolved the conflict between his undisciplined temperament and the discipline of his profession by reducing his role as historian to the task of record keeping. I said as much in a review of his Ireland under the Tudors in 1978, and some weeks later was alarmed to see him making purposefully towards me through a reception crowd, telltale large Paddy held protectively on high. ‘I liked your review’, he shouted across the heads; ‘you were exactly right’. Reaching me, he added in an undertone, ‘they were hoping that I was going to make a scene’. They were, of course, and it was typical of Dudley that he extracted as much satisfaction from disappointing the expectation as he might have done from fulfilling it. Others have told me that he became cantankerous with age, and the evidence is conclusive, but I never experienced anything but generosity from him from beginning to end.

Information

Type
Obituaries
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 26 , Issue 102 , November 1988, pp. 121 - 127
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 1988

Footnotes

1 Irish Economic and Social History, v (1978), pp 84–5.

2 Clarke, Aidan, with Edwards, R. Dudley, ‘Pacification, plantation and the catholic question’ in Moody, T.W., Martin, F.X. and Byrne, F.J. (eds), A new history of Ireland, iii (Oxford, 1976), pp 187–232 .

3 Edwards, Robert Dudley, Church and state in Tudor Ireland: a history of penal laws against Irish catholics, 1534–1603 (Dublin, 1935), p. xxiii .

4 Edwards, R.W. Dudley, ‘T. W. Moody and the origins of Irish Historical Studies: a biographical memoir’ in I.H.S., xxvi, no. 101 (May 1988), p. 1 .

5 Cullen, Clara, ‘The historical writings of Professor R. D. Edwards’ in Cosgrove, Art and McCartney, Donal (eds), Studies in Irish history presented to R. Dudley Edwards (Dublin, 1979), pp 347-53.

6 I.H.S., ii, no. 8 (Sept. 1941), pp 415–24.

7 Anal. Hib., no. 8 (1938), pp 8–177.

8 Arch. Hib., ix (1942), pp 1–172.

9 Edwards, R. Dudley and Williams, T. Desmond (eds), The Great Famine: studies in Irish history, 1845–52 (Dublin, 1957).

10 Edwards, R. Dudley and Quinn, D.B., ‘Sixteenth-century Ireland, 1485–1603’, in I.H.S., xvi, no. 61 (Mar. 1968), pp 15–32 .

11 Read, Conyers, Bibliography of British history: Tudor Period, 1485–1603 (2nd ed., Oxford, 1959); Davies, Godfrey, Bibliography of British history: Stuart period, 1603–1714; 2nd ed., Keeler, Mary (Oxford, 1970).

12 Studies, lviii (1969), pp 92–5.

13 The publishing history of the Annual Bulletin of the Irish History Students Association needs attention. I believe that it first appeared in 1956, changed its name in 1960 to Retrospect, the title under which it continues to publish.

14 Edwards, R. Dudley, ‘Rescue the records’ in Irish Archives Bulletin, i (1971), pp 7–10 .

15 A new history of Ireland (Dublin, 1972).

16 Daniel O’Connell and his world (London, 1975).

17 Ireland in the age of the Tudors: the destruction of Hiberno-Norman civilization (London, 1977).

18 Edwards, R.W. Dudley and O’Dowd, Mary, Sources for early modern Irish history, 1534–1641 (Cambridge, 1985).

19 ‘The Irish catholics and the puritan revolution’ in Fathers, Franciscan (eds), Father Luke Wadding: commemorative volume (Dublin, 1957), pp 93–118 .

20 Jourdan, G.V., chapters iv-viii, in Phillips, W.A. (ed.), History of the Church of Ireland from the earliest times to the present (3 vols, London, 1933-4), ii, 169–524 .

21 The Londonderry plantation, 1609–41: the city of London and the plantation in Ulster (Belfast, 1939).

22 Davitt and Irish revolution, 1846–82 (Oxford, 1981).

23 The phrase is Clarke, Austin’s: ‘The Yeats we knew’, Éireann, Radio, Thomas Davis Lectures, series xxxiv, no. 6, broadcast on 14 March 1965.