Maurice Ashley (historian)

Maurice Percy Ashley (4 September 1907 – 26 September 1994) was a British historian of the 17th Century and editor of The Listener. He published over thirty books, of which his Financial and Commercial Policy Under the Cromwellian Protectorate (1934) achieved wide academic influence, while his biographies Cromwell (1937) and General Monck (1977) received particular praise.

Background and education

Ashley was educated at St Paul's School and New College, Oxford, where he won the Stanhope Essay Prize (1928, 'Republicanism in the reign of Charles II') and the Gladstone Memorial (1930, 'The rise of Latitudinarianism in the Church of England'), and achieved first-class honours in Modern History in 1929. He went on to take a DPhil, studying under David Ogg, and it was his doctoral thesis that became Financial and Commercial Policy Under the Cromwellian Protectorate. Ashley's father worked as an official at the Board of Trade.

Career

In 1929 he was appointed literary assistant to Winston Churchill, who had just begun work on his biography Marlborough: His Life and Times. Ashley provided Churchill with original material from archives in Britain and Europe, earning £300 a year for this half-time employment. Although he was unimpressed by Ashley's socialistic views, Churchill praised his "competence and industry as an historical investigator". Ashley later wrote Churchill as Historian (1968), a perceptive analysis of Churchill's methods.

Ashley's career as a journalist began when he joined the staff of the Manchester Guardian as a leader writer in 1933, moving to The Times in 1937 as a foreign sub-editor.