Charles Harding Firth

At his university he took the Stanhope prize for an essay on the marquess Wellesley[?] in 1877, became lecturer at Pembroke College in 1887, and fellow of All Souls College in 1901. He was Ford's lecturer in English history in 1900, and became regius professor of modern history at Oxford in succession to Frederick York Powell in 1904. Firth's historical work was almost entirely confined to English history during the time of the Great Civil War and the Commonwealth; and although he is somewhat overshadowed by SR Gardiner, a worker in the same field, his books are of great value to students of this period. The chief of them are:

• Life of the Duke of Newcastle (1886)
• Scotland and the Commonwealth (1895)
• Scotland and the Protectorate (1899)
• Narrative of General Venables (1900)
• Oliver Cromwell (1900)
• Cromwell's Army (1902)
• the standard edition of Ludlow's Memoirs (1894).

He also edited the Clarke Papers (1891-1901), and Mrs Hutchinson's Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson (1885), and wrote an introduction to the Stuart Tracts (1903), besides contributions to the Dictionary of National Biography. In 1909 he published The Last Years of the Protectorate.

This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.