Dr Robin Eagles

Current Research

History of Parliament Research

 

I joined the History in 2001 and worked on the House of Lords 1660-1715 volumes, contributing articles on members of the Whig Junto, on a number of courtiers and diplomats, and on peers with interests in the ‘heart of England’. In January 2018 I was appointed editor of the Lords 1660-1832 section and am now working on articles covering the period 1715-1790.

 

Research and Publications

 

My own research interests span the period 1688-1788 with a particular emphasis on the experience of the aristocracy in the 1688 Revolution, opposition politics centred on Leicester House, the radical politician John Wilkes, and the old Palace of Westminster. Recent publications have included collections on Henry Bennet, earl of Arlington (co-edited with Coleman Dennehy) and on Scribal News in Politics and Parliament (co-edited with Michael Schaich).

Publications include:

- Co-edited with Michael Schaich, Scribal News in Politics and Parliament, 1660-1760 (Parliamentary History 41:1, 2022)

- ‘ “A Reward for so Meritorious an Action”? Lord Hervey’s Summons to the House of Lords and Walpole’s Management of the Upper Chamber (1727-42), in Richard A. Gaunt and D.W. Hayton, eds. Peers and Politics, c.1650-1850: Essays in Honour of Clyve Jones (Parliamentary History 39:1, 2020)

 - Co-edited with Coleman A. Dennehy, Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, And His World: Restoration Court, Politics And Diplomacy (Routledge, 2020)

- ‘Frederick, Prince of Wales, the ‘Court’ of Leicester House and the ‘Patriot’ Opposition to Walpole, c.1733–1742’, (The Court Historian, 2016),

- ‘ “I Who Speak Always Unpremeditately”: The Earl of Mulgrave's Speeches Against Corruption and in Defence of His Honour, 1692 and 1695’, (eBLJ, 2016),

- ‘ “I Have Neither Interest nor Eloquence Sufficient to Prevaile”: The Duke of Shrewsbury and the Politics of Succession during the Reign of Anne’, (eBLJ, 2015),

- The Diaries of John Wilkes, 1770-1797 (London Record Society 49, Boydell 2014),

- 'Loyal Opposition? Prince Frederick and Parliament', in Clyve Jones and James Kelly, eds. Parliament, Politics and Policy in Britain and Ireland, c.1680-1832: essays in Honour of D.W. Hayton, (Parliamentary History, 33:1, 2014),

- ‘”If he deserves it”: William of Orange’s pre-Revolution British contacts and Gilbert Burnet’s proposals for the post-Revolution administration’, in Clyve Jones, ed., Institutional Practice and Memory: Parliamentary People, Records and Histories. Essays in Honour of Sir John Sainty, (Parliamentary History 32:1, 2013),

- '"Opening the door to truth and liberty": Bowood's French connexion', in Nigel Aston and Clarissa Campbell-Orr, eds, An Enlightenment Statesman in Whig Britain, Lord Shelburne in context (1737-1805), (Boydell, 2011),

- 'Geoffrey Holmes and the House of Lords reconsidered', (Parliamentary History special issue, 28:1, Feb. 2009),

- ‘The House of Lords 1660-1707’, in Clyve Jones, ed., A Short History of Parliament, (Boydell, 2009),

- ‘Unnatural allies? The Oxfordshire elite from the exclusion crisis to the overthrow of James II’, (Parliamentary History, 26:3, Oct. 2007),

- ‘“The Only Disagreeable Thing in the Whole”: the Selection and Experience of the British Hostages for the Delivery of Cape Breton in Paris, 1748-1749’, in D.M. Medlin and K.H. Doig, eds., British-French Exchanges in the Eighteenth Century, (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007),

- ‘“No more to be said”? Reactions to the death of Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales’, (Historical Research, 80:209, Aug. 2007),

- Francophilia in English Society 1748-1815, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000),

- ‘Beguiled by France? The English aristocracy 1748-1848’, in L. Brockliss and D. Eastwood, eds., A Union of Multiple Identities: the British Isles c. 1750-1850, (Manchester University Press, 1997).