Maurice Ashley (historian)

Maurice Percy Ashley (born September 4, 1907 , † September 26, 1994 in London ) was a British historian with a focus on British history of the 17th century and journalist.

Ashley, whose father was a clerk in the Commerce Department, attended St. Paul's School in London and studied modern history at Oxford University's New College, graduating in 1929 with top marks. As a student he won the Stanhope Essay Prize (for an essay on Republicanism under Charles II) and the Gladstone Memorial. He then received his doctorate with David Ogg (1887-1965), with a dissertation on finance and trade policy under Oliver Cromwell . From 1929 to 1933 he was a historical research assistant to Winston Churchill when he was working on his ancestral biography of Marlborough . For Churchill he did archival research in Europe and later wrote a book about Churchill as a historian. From 1933 he was with the Manchester Guardian and 1937 to 1939 with The Times (in the international coverage). In 1939/40 he was editor of Britain Today, then volunteered for the Grenadier Guards and worked for the Army Intelligence Corps during World War II. Most recently he had the rank of major. In 1946 he became deputy editor and in 1958 editor of the weekly magazine of the BBC The Listener , which he remained until 1967. After he retired there he was a Research Fellow at Loughborough University of Technology from 1968 to 1970 and then devoted himself to writing books.

Ashley made The Listener a major literary review magazine and broke with the nineteenth-century tradition of anonymous review in Great Britain, which was followed by the Times Literary Supplement.

He wrote around 30 books, mainly on 17th century history, including biographies by Oliver Cromwell , Marlborough and George Monck .

From 1961 to 1977 he was President of the Cromwell Association.

In 1978 he became CBE and in 1978 he received an honorary doctorate from Oxford.

He had been married to Phyllis Griffiths since 1935, with whom he had a son and a daughter. After her death in 1987 he married Patricia Entract.

Fonts (selection)

• Financial and Commercial Policy Under the Commonwealth Protectorate, London 1934
• Oliver Cromwell: the conservative dictator, London 1937
• Marlborough, Duckworth 1957
• Louis XIV and the Greatness of France, 1946, The Free Press 1964
• John Wildman: plotter and postmaster 1947
• Great Britain to 1688: a modern history, University of Michigan Press 1961
• England in the 17th Century 1604-1714, Pelican History of England, Volume 6, 1952 and more often
• Cromwell's Generals, 1954
• The Greatness of Oliver Cromwell, 1957
• The Stuarts in love,: With some reflections on love and marriage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Macmillan 1964
• Life in Stuart England, Batsford, Putnam 1964
• The Glorious Revolution of 1688, Charles Scribner's 1966
• Churchill as Historian, 1968
• The age of the baroque. Europe between 1598 and 1715, Kindler's cultural history , 1968, dtv 1983
• Editor: Cromwell, Prentice-Hall 1969
• General Monck, London: Jonathan Cape 1977
• James II, Littlehampton Book Service 1978
• History of Europe 1648-1815, Prentice Hall 1973
• People of England. A short social and economic history, Macmillan 1982
• Charles I and Cromwell, Methuen 1987
• The English Civil War, Sutton Publ. 1990
• The Battle of Naseby and the Fall of King Charles I, 1992
• The Golden Century: Europe 1598-1715, Phoenix 2002

Web links

• Austin Woolrych, obituary in The Independent, October 4, 1994
• Entry in Making History, with photo