Dr Paul Seaward

Emeritus Director

pseaward@histparl.ac.uk

Current Research/Role

I was Director of the History from 2001-2017 and 2021-2023. In 2018-2020 I was the holder of a British Academy/Wolfson research professorship. Before joining the History I was a clerk in the House of Commons 1988-2001, and a research fellow at Christ’s College Cambridge 1984-88. I am a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research and currently hold honorary professorships at the University of Durham and Queen Mary, University of London.

Research Interests

I am currently working on The National Palaver, a history of Parliament as an institution from its medieval origins to the present, and am involved in various projects related to parliamentary history. They currently include a comparison of the Parliaments of England, Scotland and Ireland and the Polish-Lithuanian Sejm in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with Paulina Kewes from the University of Oxford and Dorota Pietrysk-Reeves from the Jagiellonian University, Krakow. I am a vice-president of the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions. I also work on seventeenth century English politics and political thought, in particular the work of the historian and lord chancellor Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. I gave the Carlyle lectures at the University of Oxford in 2024 on Clarendon, and am (with Martin Dzelzainis) editor of the Oxford edition of Clarendon’s works.

Publications

Books

Honour, Interest and Power: An Illustrated History of the House of Lords, 1660-1715 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010) [co-edited with R. Paley, B. Adams, R. Eagles and C. Littleton] 

Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion: A New Selection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) [edited, extracts from Clarendon’s History and Life, with introduction and notes] 

Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) [edited, Volume XI of the Clarendon edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes] 

Speakers and the Speakership (Wiley-Blackwell, Parliamentary History Book Series, 2010) [edited] 

The Restoration, 1660-1688 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991) 

The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) [co-edited with T. Harris and M. Goldie] The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime 1661-1667 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)

Chapters in Books

‘Architecture and Revolution at St Stephen’s and Beyond’, in T. Ayers, J. Cooper, E. Hallam Smith and C. Shenton (eds.), St Stephen’s Chapel and the Palace of Westminster (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2023)

‘Why the History of Parliament has not been written’, in D. Hayton and L. Clark (eds.),  Historians and Parliament (Wiley-Blackwell: Parliamentary History Book Series, 40:1, 2021)

‘Anglican Royalism and the Origins of the Second Anglo-Dutch War’, in D. Ormond and G. Rommelse (eds.), War, Trade and the State: Anglo-Dutch Conflict, 1652-89 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2020).

‘Parliament Observed’, in E. Chalus and P. Gauci  Revisiting The Polite and Commercial People: Essays in Georgian Politics, Society, and Culture in Honour of Professor Paul Langford (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2019)

‘Marvell and Parliament’, in E. Holberton and M. Dzelzainis (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)

‘The view from the devil’s mountain: Clarendon, Cressy and Hobbes, and the past, present and future of the Church of England’, in J. Clare (ed.), From Republic to Restoration: Legacies and Departures (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).

‘The Life of Clarendon: History and Memoir in England and France’, in P. Major (ed.), Clarendon Reconsidered: Law, Loyalty, Literature, 1640-1674 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018)

‘Institutional Memory and Contemporary History in the House of Commons, 1547–1640’ in P. Cavill and A. Gajda (eds.), Writing the History of Parliament (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).‘Learning Parliamentary Law in the Eighteenth Century: Commonplacing, Indexes and Pocket-Books’, in P. Evans (ed.), Essays on the History of Parliamentary Procedure in Honour of Thomas Erskine May (Hart publishing, 2017)

Journal Articles

‘“A Sense of Crowd and Urgency”? Atmosphere and inconvenience in the Chamber of the Old House of Commons’, in J. P. D. Cooper and R. A. Gaunt (eds.), Space and Sound in the British Parliament, 1399 to the Present: Architecture, Access and Acoustics (Parliamentary History Special Issue, 2019)

Specialisms: Seventeenth Century; History of Parliament; Political History; History of Political Thought; History of historical thought; Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon; History of Institutions