Robert [Walter] Dudley Edwards

Life
1909-1988; historian; son of English teacher and mother from Clare; ed. Synge St. CBS and St. Enda’s; ed. UCD and King’s College, London, completing doctorate on church and state in Tudor Ireland; fnd. with T. W. Moody of Journal of Irish Historical Studies to 1977; lecturer in mod. Irish history, UCD, 1939; Professor of Mod. Irish History, 1945-79; issued Church and State in Tudor Ireland (1935); other publications include A New History of Ireland (1972), Daniel O'Connell and His World (1975), and Ireland in the Age of the Tudors (1977); fnd. UCD Archive Dept. and encouraged the National Archives Act (1988); 5 June. DIW

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Works
Church and State in Tudor Ireland [...] Penal Laws, 1534-1603 (1935); The Destruction of Hiberno-Norman Civilisation (1977); ed. with Desmond Williams, The Great Famine, Studies in Irish History 1845-52 (Dublin:Browne & Nolan 1956), 517pp. [contribs. incl. R. B. McDowell, Kevin B. Nowlan, Thomas P. O’Neill, Oliver MacDonagh, Roger McHugh], and Do. [facs. rep.], with intro. & add. bibl. by Cormac Ó Gráda (Dublin: Lilliput Press 1995), 555pp.; A New History of Ireland (Dublin & London 1972); Daniel O’Connell and his World (1975); Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, the Destruction of Hiberno-Norman Civilisation (1977); with Mary O’Dowd, Sources for Early Modern Irish History 1643-1641 (1985). et al.

Miscellaneous, contrib. Dublin Historical Record (March 1938), on ‘The Beginnings of Municipal Govt. in Dublin’, p.2-10.

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Criticism
Aidan Clarke, ‘Robert Dudley Edwards’ (1909-1988), Irish Historical Studies, XXVI (1988-89), pp.121-27.

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Notes
Sean O’Faolain cites Edwards’s Church and State in Tudor Ireland (1935), on the decadence of the Irish Church in the pre-Reformation period, but adds in a ftn. his remarks about the Normans bringing armour and stone fortresses to Ireland, as well as the burning of churches, &c.; to which O’Faolain answers that the Irish had no need of instruction in this matter and that ‘It is tiresome when nations blame one another for their own faults.’ (The Irish, 1947, p.69.)

Edwards is the fater of Mary, Owen (Edinburgh University), and Ruth, writer and historian, author of biographies of Patrick Pearse, Victor Gollancz, et al.

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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)